by Tash Aw
Nowadays there is even less traffic through the small towns of the Kinta. The new North-South Highway allows a traveller to speed past the Valley in less than three hours. The journey is soothing, untroubled. You fall asleep in air-conditioned comfort, and in truth you do not miss very much. Between the hills and the invisible sea, the landscape is flat and unremarkable. Nothing catches your eye except for the many disused tin mines, now filled with rainwater. You see them everywhere in the Valley, quiet, gloomy pools of black water. I used to search for the largest ones, the ones so big I could pretend they were the ocean itself. But this pretence rarely worked. Once I stepped off the tepid, muddy shelf which ringed the pool, I was in water of untold depth, water which now covered the work of my ancestors. The temperature plunged. Every year boys from my town drowned in such pools. The shock of the cold made their muscles seize up. This was how my friend Ruby Wong died. He was my only friend from my childhood and he was a good swimmer, one of the best. Although not nearly as strong as me and slight in build, he had a smooth, easy stroke which barely broke the water yet propelled him steadily at considerable speeds. He could swim without coming to shore for an hour at a time. Once we swam across the swirling brown waters of the Perak, Ruby leading the way. We were not even out of breath when we reached the other bank.
This time we had chosen the old mine near Kellie’s Castle. It was known that only the bravest could swim the biggest pools, and there were few larger than this. We were only fourteen but we did not think twice about swimming it. Night had begun to fall when we got to the pool. I undressed quickly, eager to feel the water. Swimming in the dark felt different, special: the absence of light made my skin look less pale. The sky was blank and black with cloud. There was no moon; nothing was illuminated. Even the ripples of the water as we slid into the pool did not show.
On this swim, as on every other, there was no purpose, no silly race, no “first to the other side wins.” We just swam. A few feet from the edge, where the shelf fell away, I prepared myself for the cold. It gripped my whole body, squeezing the air from my chest. I breathed sharply, chokingly, but I had known that feeling before and so I continued to strike out. Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick. I heard Ruby’s choking breaths echoing my own, but I kept on swimming into the blackness, my eyes closed.
“Jas,” came the first call. Ruby’s voice breathed the word, it did not speak it. “Jas.”
I opened my eyes and searched for him in the infinite darkness. “Ruby?” I said, still swimming forward.
By the time I realised, several seconds later, that he was no longer there, it was too late. I swam furiously in different directions, not knowing where to look, where to turn next. In the moonless night I thought of the chickens we kept in the yard behind the factory. I don’t know why they came into my thoughts. When you entered the coop to select one of them for slaughter, they would run away in zigzags, never knowing where they were going or who they were escaping from. The victim always had a vacant expression on its face, not terrified or even sad, just lost.
Of course it was fate that the first car I met, after walking an hour on the deserted road, was Father’s. It had to be Father who found me, naked and wild-eyed. I shouted out what had happened to Ruby. Whether I made sense or not I don’t know.
“He’s not playing tricks on you,” Father said. That was just how he spoke. Never asked questions, always statements.
“No, I’m sure!” I screamed.
“You’re not telling stories?”
There was no need for me to answer.
“Then he’s dead already,” he said, opening the door for me to get in. “We’ll go back for your clothes tomorrow.”
I was afraid he was angry with me for making him go all the way home before doubling back to Kampar for his evening playing cards. I was afraid, so I said no more.
And that is how my friend Ruby Wong died, more or less.
THIS, THEN, IS WHERE the Kinta Valley lies, trapped between hills and swamps. This is the Valley which became Johnny’s little empire, where he was man and boy, where he started a family, where he was once respected by his people, where he destroyed everything.
4. How the Infamous Johnny
Became a Communist—and Other Things
IN 1933, two things happened. The price of rubber fell to 4 cents per pound and Johnny killed a man. It was the first man he killed, and although rumour has it that he did it in self-defence, I believe that the terrible deed was just as likely to have been carried out coldly, with malice aforethought (which I have learnt amounts to murder). In any case, the exact events are unclear, and the records from the Taiping Magistrates Court are somewhat muddled.
At this point in his life, Johnny was working in the Three Horses tin mine just off the Siput-Taiping road. Many young men (and women too) had begun to work in the mines. The price of rubber was now so low that many plantation owners—even English and French ones—were forced out of business. The plantations ceased to operate and were soon overwhelmed by the jungles which surrounded them. The morning bells which roused the workers ceased to toll, and the kerosene lamps which illuminated the scarred bark of the trees were no longer lit. There was no more work to be found in the plantations. So the young people began to drift further and further away from their villages in search of work, and most of them ended up in the mines.
By all accounts, Johnny was a well-regarded boy. He was quiet-spoken, diligent, and unimaginative, and was therefore perfect for working in the mines. Although barely in his teens, Johnny was no longer a manual labourer. He had risen above that. His work did not involve digging into the wet, heavy soil for twelve hours each day, or carrying basketfuls of ore from the bottom of the open-cast pits to be stored, ready for melting. He did not have to do this because, in spite of his lack of intellect, Johnny had one other attribute: a gift for understanding machinery.
There is a story about how Johnny first discovered his in-built ability to assemble and operate machines. There are many different versions of this story, but the essence of it is as follows. Johnny was thirteen years old. He had been drinking palm-flower toddy with some other delinquents, and he had enjoyed it. The sensations were new to him, as fresh in his body as the morning sun that follows a monsoon night. He went to see an old Indian man who lived on the edge of a rubber plantation, who brewed toddy the old way—the only way they ever did (and still do), illicitly, hushed-up in the half-dark of the jungle. The man collected the young flowers himself; he soaked them and bought the yeast from Cold Storage in Georgetown. He fermented the toddy just as he might have nurtured children. He remembered when each barrel was filled—born—down to the day, the hour even. He knew what the weather had been like on the day of each filling, and he knew how this would affect the taste of each vat of toddy. He knew which ones would be sweet or sour or just strong and tasteless. Whenever he produced something memorable, a toddy of remarkable clarity or distinctive taste, he would give it a special name—“White Lakshmi,” perhaps, or “Nearly as Good as Mother’s Milk.”
Johnny was fascinated by this. He visited the old man often, and drank often too. But all this time he was disturbed by the way the toddy was brewed. He didn’t like the old kerosene drums the old man used to ferment the toddy in. Some of them were rusty, and on others the lids didn’t fit properly. The old man said that this was the way things were done, that toddy had to be varied and different. Every sip had to provide you with the sensation of stepping off a cliff without knowing what lay beneath. Mad fool, Johnny thought; he did not accept this. He wanted every mouthful of toddy to be as good as the best toddy he had ever tasted. He didn’t enjoy discovering a bitter toddy, or a new and unusual one. He knew, too, that people sometimes fell sick after drinking toddy; they became blind, they died. On top of all this, one day when they had been filling bottles, they found a rat at the bottom of one of the barrels. It lay bobbing amidst the sediment, curled up and peacefully preserved in the alcohol. Not even the cat touched it when they threw it out into t
he long grass.
So Johnny went away and thought for a long time. He drew pictures in the sand, idle midafternoon sketches of simple machines. He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew, instinctively, that he would do something.
People still talk about Johnny’s invention in the Valley; they say nothing as magical has been seen since. Not even the revolving dining room at the Harmony Silk Factory, built when I was in my teens, could rival Johnny’s first, instinctive creation. This is high praise indeed, for the revolving dining room was itself a much-admired feature of our house. The entire floor would split in half and a partition wall would emerge from a vault beneath the floor, separating the one large room into two smaller ones. Hidden in the ceiling, behind the walls and under the floor, was a simple but highly effective clockwork mechanism. Polished mahogany panelling adorned the room, drawing the attention of a visitor (more specifically, a policeman or a rival “businessman”) to the décor rather than the construction of the room. Fake European master-pieces, painted by artists in Penang, hung in gilded frames on the walls. (I looked them up in books when I was at school, and discovered that my two favourites were The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel and The Death of Actaeon by Titian.) One of the two rooms—the second, smaller one—was built into the thick rear wall of the factory, making it soundproof and totally secure. The purpose of this was originally to provide a hiding place in case of an emergency. It was conceived of at a time when we had a new police superintendent who arrived in the district determined to put an end to all crime, from the most petty thefts to the largest organised rackets. The new Sir was often seen striding down the main street of our little town, his bushy flame-red moustache always immaculate, his waxen English skin still strangely unblemished by the sun. He never spoke to anyone, and people began to fear him. This was when our revolving dining room was built. Endless sketches were made, parts were ordered from Singapore, carpenters all over the country were put on notice, timber was felled in North Borneo. By the time the necessary machinery had been installed, however, the superintendent—Malcolm—was firmly in Johnny’s pocket. He came to the factory and drank Napoleon brandy late into the night, and he acquired a Chinese mistress called Wendy. When he visited our house, I noticed he had a gold wristwatch with an ebony face. It looked brand-new.
But it was Johnny’s first creation, the Amazing Toddy Machine, which was the most famous and enduring. Although very few people actually saw it, its reputation was widespread, and its products enjoyed even farther afield. At the heart of this new invention was a large glass tank in which the various raw components were mixed. Everything could be seen clearly in this tank—the initial chemical reaction, the colour, the consistency—and regulating the process was made easier. Nothing was left to chance. The transparency of the machine allowed the brewer to intervene if he thought something was going wrong. The tank was sealed, so any impurities (not to mention animals) could not find their way in. As the system grew, Johnny found a way of increasing the output dramatically—more glass tubes were attached, linking more tanks together, all bubbling away at various stages of ferment. At some point a distillation mechanism was added, ensuring the final product was as clear and smooth as spring water. For a while, purely as a novelty, the toddy was filtered through layers of mangrove wood charcoal, drip by slow drip. People were puzzled by the taste of this, but fascinated too, and soon even more glass tubes and tanks were added. At its height, the machine was said to have resembled a tiny crystal mountain, sparkling with a life of its own.
Johnny’s gift for machines has always been evident to me. Even as a young child, I knew that while other people could perhaps take apart a car engine and then reassemble it, not everyone could do it as Johnny could. It wasn’t so much what he did but how he did it—steadily and gently, with a rhythm all his own. The parts of the engine fell away into his hands like pieces of silk; he held greasy steel bolts the way you or I might hold a newborn chick. I used to watch him fixing things. Whenever he repaired a clock—that was my favourite. His short peasant’s fingers, clumsy in every other way, would suddenly move with all the delicacy of a silk weaver’s. Where other men might have used tweezers or screwdrivers or other tools, Johnny seemed only to use his fingers, touching each part of the clockwork. I always pretended to be doing something else—passing through the room or reading a book. He never knew I was watching.
THE TODDY MACHINE was the beginning of a particular episode in Johnny’s life that goes something like this: Armed with this gift, this knowledge of machines, Johnny becomes well known. People all over the Valley hear about the toddy, they hear about the young man who made it. The mines need people to work in them, but these are hard times for the Chinese mines. They have been in the Valley for fifty, sixty years, since long before the railway was built between Port Weld and Butterworth. They are big, open-cast mines with old-fashioned gravel pumps. But it is not good for them now, because new mines have opened all over the Valley. British mines.
What makes these British mines different is that they do not need many hundreds of coolies to work in them. This is because they have, at the heart of the mine, a mechanised colossus never seen before in these parts. It is called a Dredging Machine, and it does the work of a thousand coolies. It sits astride the mine as the goddess Guan Yin herself sat on a vast lake, floating for all eternity. The Chinese fear this machine, for they do not possess one. The British do not need many men, they simply need a few good ones. Of all the Chinamen in the Valley, only one will be able to understand the Dredging Machine, and it does not take long for the British to learn of his existence.
The first time Johnny sees the Dredger he does not see the monstrous, angry machine everyone else sees. Instead, he sees a living creature. He understands it at once. He sees limbs—huge mechanical limbs—and a body; he senses organs buried deep within it, and a heart too. It is as if he has always known this thing. When he is shown the machine, the words of explanation are as familiar to his ears as the rising and falling of the damp November winds. He has heard them a thousand times before. Even on that first day, he wants to start working with the machine. The British man who is in charge stands behind him, watching as he works the levers which turn the cogs which run the pump which fires the pistons which bring the ore up to the surface from the depths of the mine. The five minutes—the test of Johnny’s understanding of the machine—turn quickly into ten, twenty, forty minutes, an hour. Johnny and the machine cannot be separated. The machine wants to be worked by Johnny. “Quite remarkable,” the man in charge says. “The Dredger loves this boy.” They are like a mother and her child who, after a lengthy separation, fall into each other’s arms with relief. Johnny is then taken to the longhouse where the special workers are given lodgings. It is made of rough, unplaned wood, full of splinters which embed themselves in Johnny’s feet and hands. The rain drums loudly on the zinc roof, but the house is dry and secure. Johnny sleeps on a thin mattress laid out on the floor. At night he can hear the scratching of small animals, but they are outside and he is inside. He is also given a piece of paper saying that he is now an employee of the Darby Tin Mine. Everyone is smiling. They do not yet know of the bad things Johnny will do.
About two months after Johnny first begins working at the Darby Mine, the Dredger breaks down for the first time. At first no one knows what to do. In case of emergencies, the workers have been told that one of them is to run to the foghorn and sound it three times, long and hard. The meaning of “emergency” is unclear, though. Only twice before has the foghorn been sounded: once when the monsoon rains, heavier than usual, washed away an entire face of the mine; and another time when the chief engineer’s wife, the only English woman in the area, appeared suddenly and without reason, in the middle of the afternoon. On other occasions, even when someone was badly hurt or even killed in an accident, no alarm was raised and work went on as usual.
For a long time, there is nothing but a huge, empty silence. The roar of the Dredger, which usually drowns out ev
ery other sound, is not to be heard. The workers do not know what to do. When at last the foghorn blows, pathetically, three times in the midmorning air, it barely carries to the cream-painted hut where the British Sirs sit, leafing through papers which no one else can understand. One by one the Sirs come out of the hut, each fixing his hat to his head. Their shirts are damp and stick to their skins. Their faces, the workers can see, are heavy with heat, fatigue, and disgust.