The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

  The people of the Valley paid their taxes because Johnny said they had to. It was hard, but they trusted his wisdom. They were not siding with the Japanese, they were not funding the war against their brothers in China, he said; it was merely a matter of survival. In secret lectures he told them they were fooling the Japanese into believing the Valley was friendly. They had to be patient while their boys in the jungle mounted a campaign to topple the Japs.

  Trust me, he said. Believe me.

  And to this day I think people still believe what he said.

  N EARLY AUGUST 1942 Johnny began to organise a top-secret, top-level meeting of the senior commanders of the Communist Party. An underground movement had already established a guerilla army called the Malayan Anti-Japanese People’s Army. Johnny must have thought of the name. It was ridiculous and overly grand for a group of malnourished, badly equipped Chinese adolescents camped in the jungle. Few people could remember or pronounce the name, and even its acronym was often forgotten. Nonetheless, this band of guerillas proved to be a hardened bunch. They attacked police stations and ambushed groups of Japanese soldiers returning from nights out at the army brothels. Once they even succeeded in kidnapping and killing a mid-ranking Japanese captain. The Valley was full of talk of British commandos who had stayed on behind enemy lines to train and organise these guerillas. People whispered about a $20 million reward for the head of any white man found in the jungle. Some villagers even claimed to have seen British soldiers alighting in twos and threes from small boats along the mangrove coastline.

  Sixteen men formed the Supreme Central Committee of Communist commanders. The majority of them lived and fought in the heart of the jungle, but a number of them led double lives. Like Johnny, they were men of commerce and industry. It took many days for Johnny to spread word about the meeting to these men. With Japanese ears in every village, the old network of communication had become slower and more cautious. The news seeped slowly across the country, whispered by hidden mouths into invisible ears. The sense of anticipation grew with every whisper.

  Johnny has summoned us to a meeting.

  Johnny has been in touch with the British.

  Johnny has weapons. He has plans.

  A date was set: 1 September.

  A place too: the massive catacomb of limestone caves lying just beyond the southernmost tip of the Valley.

  The caves are a million years old and their secret depths have always inspired extremes in the hearts and minds of those people who come here. That is why, for over a century, Hindus have worshipped here at the shrines of Subramaniam and Ganesh. Once a year, the most devout of them paint their faces and unclothed bodies and walk barefoot over glowing embers of coal; others pierce their noses, cheeks, necks, and arms with immense skewers upon which fruit and other offerings are balanced.

  It is just as well that worshippers come every year to this holy site. The layers and layers of devotion might someday erase the evil of that single day in 1942.

  I felt the sadness of that day when I visited the caves myself. I went there on the day I found out what my father had done. I stood in a corner of the innermost cave, tucking myself in beside a small shrine, hiding behind the many-armed figures which guarded its entrance, just as Johnny’s men must have done that dreadful day. My shoulder scraped flakes of peeling paint onto the damp floor. The smell of camphor soot filled my head and I closed my eyes. I stayed, as those men had, until the last of the visitors had gone and the afternoon swiftly became evening. The men had mingled for some hours among the other visitors to the caves. I could see them all around me, lurking in the shadows, barely perceptible in my mind’s eye. They glanced at one another now and then, catching one another’s eye for a brief moment before moving on, gazing emptily at the painted walls and ceilings. Slowly, they established who was present. Fifteen leaders, each with several lieutenants, forty-four men in all.

  The most important of all, though, was not yet there.

  In the heart of each man, doubt began to creep. Where was he? Had he been caught and killed at last? Forty-four was a very bad number, very unlucky for all Chinese, even Communists. It meant: death.

  Night fell quickly, as it always did, but this time it felt blacker and deeper than ever before.

  One man broke the silence, whispering out into the dark. “Friends, comrades, who is here?”

  I am, the whispers multiplied, coming together as they did. Brief silence, all men waiting for the voice they most wanted to hear.

  Hands on pistols: a figure approaching from the mouth of the outer caves, barely outlined in the darkness. Is it him? someone asked. I don’t know. Can’t tell. Listen. A steady, heavy tread, confident, afraid of nothing. No man had a walk like that. No man except Johnny.

  The men relaxed their grips on their weapons. None could see the smiles on the others’ faces. They stood huddled together in the dark, lambs awaiting their shepherd.

  A flash of light, blinding, colourful. Smoke. Gas! Quick, boys! They dropped to the floor, fumbling and clutching at their clothes, tearing off their shirts to cover their mouths and noses. Pistols drawn, they searched for the invisible danger through stinging eyes. The thundering, whipping, cutting crack of machine-gun fire.

  Johnny, where’s Johnny?

  They fired into the smoke, slowly choking and suffocating. Some of them stood up and were instantly felled.

  Fight on, fight on, they urged each other. They did not fear death.

  Johnny will save us.

  That is what they believed right to the end.

  One by one they were cut down. A few ran screaming from the burning fog and were bayonetted by Japanese soldiers as they emerged from the mouth of the cave. When at last the smoke began to thin, the Japanese searched the caves with torches. The streams of light danced on the wet and bloody walls and shone in the eyes of the survivors, who were arrested and taken away. They spent many weeks in Kempeitai jails, where two of them committed suicide: one broke a spoon in two and cut his own throat with the jagged pieces, and the other threw himself into a dry well in the prison compound. The other survivors, for the sake of a few pathetic pieces of information, suffered torture of varying lengths of time and severity. And then all were executed, either beheaded with a sword or shot in the back of the head.

  The Malayan Anti-Japanese People’s Army would never be the same again. Twenty-nine of the most important Communists in the country were killed at the caves, and another fifteen arrested and executed. Of the sixteen commanders only one survived. One. The Famous Chinaman Called Johnny.

  Rumours (no doubt perpetuated by Johnny) spread quickly. The most popular version of the story was that Johnny had miraculously escaped the Japanese ambush by fighting his way through a cordon of soldiers and had scaled a sheer limestone crag a hundred feet high before disappearing into the forest. Others said that Johnny had been seen in the heart of the Valley, fifty miles from the caves, late that afternoon; that he had found out about the Japanese plans to attack the caves and had tried to use his connections to prevent the massacre. And there were a few who insisted that they had seen Johnny late that evening, his clothes bloody and riddled with bullet holes; he had simply walked through a hail of bullets and emerged unscathed. There was nothing the Japanese or anyone could do to him. People reminded themselves what had happened when Tiger’s shop burnt down. Remembering the events of that day gave them comfort. Their trust was safe with Johnny.

  Only I among all these people know the truth. I have had the help of books, official records, memoirs; I have history on my side. If the poor uneducated people of the Valley knew what I knew, Johnny’s life would have turned out very differently. I know, for example, that no one but the sixteen commanders—no one—knew the date and location of the meeting. I also know that during the Occupation, when no one had any money and tens of millions of dollars in crippling taxes were being poured into the Japanese treasury, my father built the Japanese-Malayan Peace Monument on the site of the smoking ruins of T
iger Tan’s old shop. It was made of carved sandstone and marble, paid for by my father’s personal funds. He bought a new motorcar and smoked cigars with Japanese generals. He searched the Valley for the biggest, most expensive building and turned it into the most famous palace of sin in the country. He named it the Harmony Silk Factory. It was the envy of every man, woman, and child in the country.

  10. Conclusion

  THE FUNERAL OF A TRAITOR is a tricky thing, particularly if that traitor was someone close to you. You may be tempted, as I was, to avoid it altogether as a sign of protest at the crimes that person has committed. But if that person is your father and you are his only son, you have no choice. If no one else knows that he was a traitor, then your protest becomes meaningless. So I stood alone throughout the three-day ceremony, locked away with only my terrible, secret knowledge for company.

  In truth there was little for me to do. By the time I returned to the factory from KL, all the arrangements had been made. People were only too keen to help. Mrs. Ginger Khoo and her five children looked after the catering, serving a thousand meals over the course of the three days. Gurnam Singh, one of Father’s former chauffeurs, who had had to give up work because of chronic syphilis (now cured, he told me), was on hand to organise the tables, chairs, and electric fans. Father’s closest friends, his old business partners, were in charge of the most important things: the priest, the undertaker, and the paper offerings. Securing my arrival was another one of their tasks, and my appearance was greeted with some relief.

  “I am glad you have decided to make peace with your father,” Mad Dog Kwang whispered in my ear.

  “There was never anything broken that needed repair,” I replied.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Many hundreds came to pay their respects. All kinds of people turned up—princes, peasants, politicians, criminals, pensioners, toddlers. They travelled from far afield, not just from the remotest reaches of the country, and some came from abroad. There were mourners from Hong Kong and Indonesia and Thailand, together with the odd Filipino. A few white men were there too, though where they were from was anyone’s guess. One of them was an Englishman, I think, though he was so old it was difficult to tell. He sat folded over in a wheelchair, barely able to move amid the crowd of bodies, looking lost and confused. He seemed not to be able to speak, though occasionally he coughed and wheezed a few curious sounds. “Is he mute?” I asked Madam Veronica (as she now liked to be called—when I was a small boy I knew her as Auntie Siew Ching).

  “Don’t know. I heard that something happened to him in the war,” Madam Veronica said as she adjusted the gold bangles on her wrist.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Can’t remember. Peter Something. Or maybe Philip Something.”

  I found myself standing next to this ancient Englishman on the first day. Trails of thick spittle hung from the roof of his gaping, trembling mouth, but no words emerged. Finally he repeated a few sounds; he clutched at my sleeve and stared at me with wild staring eyes.

  “What the hell is he saying?” Mad Dog said as he walked past.

  I listened carefully. “He is asking me who I am. He is asking what my name is.”

  The man’s head jerked and nodded involuntarily as he spoke. I felt strangely sorry for him. “I’m Johnny’s son,” I said, wondering if he could understand me.

  “Johnny’s son,” he repeated blankly, “Johnny’s son.”

  “People say I don’t look like him,” I said patiently. “I take after my mother, you see.”

  When he looked at me I could see the fine red veins in his yellowed eyes. “Sons never resemble their fathers,” he said before wheeling himself away slowly.

  “Shit, you could understand that guy? No one even knows what language he’s speaking,” Mad Dog remarked in an uninterested way.

  “Crazy foreigners,” Mrs. Khoo said as she swept past me carrying a plate of fluffy white buns in each hand.

  Children played with yo-yos and plastic action heroes which Gurnam had handed out. “Where did you get so many toys?” I asked him.

  “I found them at the factory,” he said, “many bags full of them. Just arrived from Taiwan.”

  We burnt the paper offerings on the second evening, once all the minor rituals had been dealt with. Father’s friends had ordered the most elaborate and expensive offerings they could think of, the grandest luxuries fit for a man of Father’s standing. Firstly, there was a paper motorcar, a Mercedes-Benz, bronze-coloured as Father’s last car had been. It was five feet long and had a paper chauffeur sitting at its paper wheel. Then there was a paper aeroplane, a Boeing 747.

  “Is he going to need that in the afterlife?” I asked Mad Dog.

  “He never got a chance to fly in an airplane,” he replied, smiling, “so we thought we would give him a treat.”

  Finally there was a paper house, virtually life-size, a replica of the Harmony Silk Factory. It had galleried windows overlooking the courtyard as the factory did, and an open-air kitchen at the rear. I wandered around this house, looking at the tiny details. Little potted ferns, carefully painted green, decorated the red-tiled courtyard. They were the only kind of plant which ever grew happily in the courtyard, and their dark leaves used to add to the coolness of that sun-shielded space. The shutters had been painted pale jade, and through the open windows I could see the black-and-white chequerboard floor of the upstairs sitting room. I saw the rosewood furniture that we never used, preferring instead to sit on rough wooden chairs. Father’s safe room was there too, locked as usual. The shop was full of beautiful things, colourful cloths and sparkling glass cabinets and boxes of jewels. The revolving dining room no longer revolved, but it had its European Old Masters on the walls. My bedroom, which looked out onto both the courtyard and the back of the house, was kept as neatly as always. Through the window I could see the river, wide and brown and muddy. I could see the wooden pontoon underneath the ancient banyan tree. We used to swim there, my friends and I, diving from the bridge into the warm, thick water. We used to climb the tree and swing from its trailing vines until we were twenty yards out and then let go, splashing from a great height into the river. Early in the evenings we would creep onto the pontoon and lower pieces of meat on fishhooks into the water to catch catfish, which emerged from murky recesses to feed at night. From my window I could see the herons and egrets and storks wade through the shallows in the morning. I used to wake up early—at dawn, when everything was pearl-coloured and soft—so that I could see them flying smoothly across the mist-covered water, their sleek heads tucked gently into their necks.

  My books lined the teak shelves that Father had built when I was ten and hungry to read. If I thought he was in a good mood I would read him stories from these books, singing and screeching as I imagined the voices of all the characters. Occasionally he would smile. I was pleased because I thought I had made him happy, and I would embellish my stories further, making them up as I went along. When he smiled he looked as if he remembered what life really was, and so I would tell even more stories. But sometimes he would realise I wasn’t just reading from the book; he would get angry and scold me for making things up, for telling tales. His face would turn black with fury, as if he hated me more than anything in the world. Life would drain from his face, leaving it empty once more.

  We set fire to the house, the car, and the aeroplane just as it was turning dark. Hennessy XO was poured in a ring around the paper replicas to protect against thieving spirits; its heavy perfume laced the twilight air. As Johnny’s son, I had the responsibility to set the offerings alight, and I did so quickly, touching my burning roll of newspaper to the house in as many places as possible before the flames became unbearable. I ran back to stand with the other mourners. We stood under a purple sky and watched the house burn down.

  Death, I remembered Father saying, erases all traces of the life that once existed, completely and forever.

  HE NEXT DAY I left as soon as I could. I slipped away from th
e throng of people returning from the cemetery and headed for my car, hoping to leave before I was missed. I did not want to say too many goodbyes.

  The old Englishman in the wheelchair had parked himself in the kitchen, where he sat nodding and mumbling to himself. He was holding a parcel wrapped in a piece of cloth. He held it up to me as I approached him.

  “Thank you,” I said, resenting the number of gifts I had managed to acquire over the three days. People felt the need to provide me, the only son, with tokens of their respect for Father. And so I received an array of useless objects: small crystal swans, plaster-of-paris Eskimos, and mugs bearing the prime minister’s portrait. I did not stop to open the box and hurried instead to the car. I threw the cloth-wrapped parcel into the boot together with all the other unwanted presents; its contents rattled as it landed on a cuckoo clock.

  The Englishman followed me out, wheeling himself along the uneven road. “Where are you going, my son?” he said.

  “Swimming,” I said as I got into my car.

  I didn’t drive back to KL. I headed east instead, crisscrossing the winding river until I found myself in the swampy flatlands of the coast. I veered north, turning into ever-narrowing roads until I could smell the salty winds coming in off the sea. Just south of Remis I caught the first glimpse of the foam-tipped waves through a thin forest of casuarinas. I had not been here for many years. I drove along until I found somewhere to leave my car. I undressed slowly under the trees, the dead needles tickling my feet. It was midafternoon and there was no one but me on the wide white beach. I walked across the hot sand into the water, watching the tiny crabs scurrying away from my path. Where the water was deeper, the waves folded over gently, catching the sun on their crests so that the light sparkled across the surface of the water. It was as if someone had cast tiny jewels all over the ocean. I swam far out from the shore, floating calmly in the blue-green water.