by Sandi Tan
I can still smell those flags. Mildew, tobacco, and cloves. I remember wondering in whose cupboards they’d been stowed and at which far-flung edge of the empire—Rhodesia? Cairo? Calcutta? My mind was flooded with images of minarets, barefoot children, and dusty courtyards. But these romantic musings were quickly dashed.
“Chop, chop!”
Our self-appointed supervisors began to hurry us in their insulting pidgin, as if every second suddenly mattered. Chop, chop, as if we were mindless servants or dogs. Chop, chop, as if they had no idea, no concern, as to what we’d gone through in the last few years. Chop, chop, and they turned back the clock to 1939.
One of the first actions the British took upon returning was to expel the desperate families huddled inside the Balmoral Hotel and restore its policy of “Europeans Only.” Even before visiting hospitals or feeding the poor, they chose to remind us that we were second-class boarders in our own land.
Only days before, I had joined thousands in merrily ripping down the Japanese insignia covering the city. Fueled by songs like “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” we tore at them until our hands bled. Such optimism! But as soon as these colonials began shouting orders, we experienced a united shudder of déjà vu.
The musty old stench had returned, and it permeated everything. Most of us abandoned hope, and with it the Union Jacks. We let them be trampled on streets, drowned in drains, blown aside by the wind. The British overseers gaped, incredulous that their orders were being openly defied, but they could do nothing. There were just too many of us. And now we knew it.
I sought work at the General Hospital on Alexandra Road, a rain tree–lined avenue close to the harbor. They were desperately shorthanded and I was desperately poor. Like hundreds of others, I had been sleeping in the boarded-up corridor of a High Street shopping arcade. My days of savoring chocolate, cognac, and books were a distant, fantastical memory.
I could have gone to the back garden of the old Wee mansion and dug up some of their buried heirlooms, but I dreaded the horrors I might uncover once I began digging.
The hospital’s reception desk was next to a pillar pocked with bullet holes. As I approached, nurses, patients, and ghosts gathered around a wireless, listening to a testy British general being interviewed:
“No, no, it wasn’t that they were better soldiers,” he corrected the interlocutor. “That’s utter rubbish! One British soldier is equal to ten Japanese—but unfortunately there were eleven Japanese. I tell you, it all boiled down to numbers…”
Somebody jeered, but nobody lifted a finger to turn the radio off. It was such a relief to have the airwaves filled with something other than hectoring Japanese brutes, and the listeners were addicted, rapt, greedy even for myths. Tired of the general’s lies, I left the building without a soul—living or dead—turning to watch me go.
Next, I tried Woodbridge, the mental hospital next door. The Isle had long been home to a disproportionately high number of such places, catering to all from the wives and daughters of colonials who’d failed to take to the tropical torpor to the hordes of overworked laborers from India and China who feigned madness to grab a few nights’ respite from their filthy, overcrowded quarters.
Woodbridge was the grand-nanny of them all—the largest, newest, and most efficient at keeping its population in line. Its establishment in 1935 rendered all of the Victorian madhouses obsolete by culling the Island’s lunatics under one roof and freeing the older buildings for new lives as schools, libraries, and hotels—all of them very haunted. Though devotees of British colonial architecture had complained about its bunkerlike starkness, I was grateful for its lack of gloomy filigree.
The institution took me on instantly as a receptionist without asking for any credentials. What they did do was glance at my hands; although they were scuffed, I had all my fingers, and this was enough to make me a good hire. The staff was overwhelmed with new patients—the Indian head nurse scowled when I called them inmates—and needed all the help they could get. Most of the influx had been transferred from overcrowded hospitals and weren’t actually insane. “Not yet, anyway,” the head nurse, Miss Joseph, muttered darkly, gesturing for me to follow her.
She took me on a brisk tour of the wards, which radiated the smell of cheap disinfectant. The patients ranged from textbook loons, baying as they sat strapped into chairs, to docile crazies who smilingly smeared food on their hair yet knew each nurse by name. They were housed by level, with the most violent in the basement, the more sedate on the second and third floors, and the harmless ones at the top.
My heart almost stopped when, on the fourth and highest floor, in a quiet ward reserved for “sleepers,” I saw a familiar face, sitting up in his bunk while all around him everybody slept.
It was Li.
At first, I doubted my eyes because when I called his name, his face offered not the slightest trace of recognition. But when I stepped closer, I knew: It was indeed Li, my Li, in Woodbridge’s standard sky-blue pajamas. After a few seconds, he looked puzzled, like a little boy just rustled from his nap. He knew he was supposed to recognize me, but try as he might, he did not.
“Don’t make eye contact, Cassandra,” cautioned Miss Joseph. “Leave that to the professionals.”
“Can you tell me what happened to him?” I couldn’t keep my voice from wobbling. “That’s my brother.”
Miss Joseph gave me a look of surprise; her eyes softened. “Wonders never cease.” She strode to a metal pocket at the end of the ward and pulled out a battered-looking ledger. “Ah, yes. He’s not one of the transfers. A Jap walked him in personally very late one night when it was raining like crazy. Both were drenched from head to toe. I was on night duty, doing reception, and I remember thinking how weird it was. Gave me gooseflesh, actually. The Jap didn’t give his name and I didn’t ask for it, naturally, but he was quite tall, no-nonsense, about thirty, thirty-five. A Jap helping a Chinese—you didn’t see that very often, and this was even before the surrender.”
Tall, no-nonsense, thirtyish. The Japanese man might have been Taro. But why would he have done this good deed—without telling me and taking credit for it?
I looked over at Li, who only appeared to be gazing back; his line of vision drooped midway between us.
Miss Joseph frowned at the ledger. “Says here the boy stayed quite lucid, but then, a few minutes after Hiroshima, he suddenly went into convulsions and fell into a coma. That’s why he was sent up here. Seems he’s been unconscious until this morning, in fact. Now he’s in what we call the settling-in period, when he will slowly readjust to the world around him. If he’s lucky.”
A few minutes after Hiroshima—did this have to do with the toffee?
The nurse patted my arm. “He won’t be going anywhere soon. Make all the eye contact you want.”
After she showed me what I’d be required to do, mainly reception desk duties because of my fluency in languages, she took me to my lodgings in a hostel behind the hospital—a relief from the shopping arcade walkway. I thanked her and raced back to the fourth floor, two steps at a time. I was terrified that Li might have somehow vanished, that my earlier glimpse of him had been nothing more than a hallucination. But there he was, the only one awake in a ward of thirty or so slumbering souls, sitting as alert as a meerkat. He pointed his index finger straight at me.
“I know you,” he said in Shanghainese. His voice was hoarse.
“Of course you know me.”
I hurried to his side and embraced him tightly, the tears now falling freely down my cheeks. The nurses, thank God, had been feeding him intravenously—there was flesh on him—but he kept his arms lank by his sides the whole time. After clinging to him for several minutes, hoping he’d remember the warmth of my body or my scent, I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for him to speak again.
“I know you,” he repeated, “but I don’t know who. I’m all mixed up.”
“Take your time. The war’s over. The important thing is that we survived, Li. You and I.” I hugged
him again. Again, his arms didn’t respond.
“The war?” He screwed up his face and pondered. “Are you my mother?”
I wanted to sob. But I laughed, for his sake.
“I’m your sister, your twin. We’re the same age, to the very day. We were born in Shanghai together. We came to the Black Isle together. On a boat. With our father. Do you remember Shanghai at all? Bullock Cart Water? The plantation?”
Li closed his eyes, concentrating.
“Do you remember the toffee?”
His eyes popped open, and with an expression of childish glee, he cooed, “Shanghai!”
I squeezed his hand. He wasn’t completely lost to our world after all.
“And toffee.” He grinned. “I like toffee. Did you bring some for me?”
“No, not today. Maybe tomorrow. But tell me, Li, do you remember your special toffee, the one you carried with you everywhere?”
He shook his head, growing annoyed that I seemed to be testing or tricking him. Then all of a sudden, his eyes sparkled.
“I remember, yes!” he exclaimed. “Twins! The babies. They had furry arms. Are they here? I want to see them. I want to play with them.”
“They’re not here, Li…We didn’t take them with us.”
“How could we leave without them?”
He was right. How could we? My eyes filled up. “It was a very long time ago.”
“But I want to play with them.” His voice had taken on a childish whine.
Before I could calm him, he exploded into violent tears, bawling like an infant who wanted his mum to put things right.
“I want them here now!”
A Eurasian nurse came running into the ward light-footedly, glancing around to make sure Li’s wails hadn’t woken the others. She had a syringe poised in her hand, ready to plunge its mollifying sap into Li’s flesh. Seeing her, Li gave a series of nervous whoops before the needle descended into his thigh. A second later, he was limp.
“What did you do to him?” I cried.
“We don’t tolerate screaming here. Twelve hours of sleep ought to calm him.”
“But we were just talking.”
“Please leave,” the nurse said, glowering, “unless you’d like one of those, too.”
At daybreak the next morning, I returned to see Li. His so-called settling-in had made little progress. All he remembered began and ended with Shanghai; all he loved began and ended with the twins. I tried to jog his memory by mentioning the name of his school, his favorite playmates, the karang-guni men who frightened us, even the pontianak. But nothing. It was the same the next day and the day after that, and even after he was moved from the coma ward to another that allowed him movement.
No matter his new freedom, Li remained trapped in the past. It was a tune he couldn’t shake, but it was the only tune he knew. I told myself, At least he’s alive. We have time—give him time.
Although I fought against it, Li’s preoccupation with our past filled my mind with ghosts.
I didn’t know how or where to begin looking for our sisters. Certainly, the British authorities wouldn’t help. I would have had to cultivate friends with ties to China, who would then have to be willing to write letters or make inconvenient journeys on my behalf. The process could take months, even years. And in all honesty, I didn’t want to start a search that might produce an answer I wasn’t prepared to hear. It seemed more important to find my own bearings first, to recalibrate my here and now.
Several weeks after their return, the British held a ceremony on the Padang for the Isle’s civilian war heroes. The whole island was invited, but the grounds still held the stigma of exclusion for too many; only two hundred showed up. The spectators, mainly Westerners, clustered around the steps of city hall. The organizers had expected thousands to spill onto the green. As it turned out, bullhorns were barely needed.
I told myself I was going only because I had nothing better to do, but this wasn’t wholly true. I felt entitled to go, as a survivor and an Islander. I was curious to learn who the government was going to reward. Would they acknowledge the local heroes or anoint only their own, members of the Europeans-only civil service?
Predictably, they began by bestowing medal after medal on British men and women—a few seemingly unscathed by the war, others permanently shattered by their years at Shahbandar, so broken they had to be helped up the steps. I pitied them but felt no kindness whatsoever toward the committee to whom natives did not matter and native heroes certainly did not exist. They made no attempt to conduct the event in any language other than English, and I watched a family of Malays, dressed in finery for the occasion, storm away. They had grasped no more than a clutch of words. I, too, eventually broke from the crowd and worked off my irritation by walking onto the Padang, where one of the earliest and biggest bombs had fallen.
The central crater had been filled in with soil but remained bald: The grass hadn’t grown back in four years. Strange, for there was a saying on the Isle that if you stuck an ice cream stick in any field, you’d have a tree the following day.
I soon found out why. As I neared, a group of European boys and girls materialized, running along the rim of the enormous dell, stamping their feet. They were their own grave tenders, trampling on any sprig of green that emerged from the bomb site, their death site.
“I don’t want them to forget us,” a boy with pale lashes told me.
I was about to console him with a platitude when my ears perked up. At last, non-Western names were being announced on the bullhorn.
“Mr. Zhang Ming…Mr. Iskandar Ibrahim…Mr. Kenneth Kee…”
Kenneth? Could he still be alive? I began sprinting back.
I arrived to see three very familiar figures descending the steps, bedecked with red sashes and brass medallions. I was smiling so wide that my cheeks ached. There was Cricket with his pink birthmark; Issa, shorn of his long hair; and the one and only Kenneth Kee. The odd triumvirate smiled demurely at the crowd, grateful yet not exultant.
Prison had made all three startlingly lean, especially Cricket, who had been chunky from youth. But far from looking weakened, Kenneth was muscled, more sleekly defined.
I rushed to meet them at the bottom of the steps, expecting to find them surrounded by proud, weeping relatives. But they were alone.
Kenneth was the first to notice me. Naturally, he acted blasé, as if he’d expected me all along.
“I feel faintly ridiculoush, like I’d won the bronze for shot put or javelin.” He lifted the brass medal embossed in cursive: For Gallantry. “Not quite the Victoria Crossh, ish it?”
His voice was strange. He now had a clenched-jaw kind of lisp, as though he had missing teeth or a swollen tongue. Although I wanted to, I didn’t dare embrace him. I’d never done it, for he always struck me as one who’d disdain such intimacy. Instead it was Cricket who walked over and surprised me with a hug.
Kenneth placed a reassuring hand on his comrade’s shoulder.
“Enough, Zhang,” he said, “or they’ll demand your medal back.”
Now it was only Issa—Iskandar Ibrahim in name, if the announcer had got it right—who kept his distance. Not only were his gold earrings gone, but also his right hand was disfigured; like an unfinished sketch, it was missing its thumb. Still, the aura of a shaman hadn’t been wholly stripped from him. His cosmic arrogance had outlived the war. He stood apart from us, arms folded, finally deigning to give me the minutest of nods. With him, I knew I had to make the first move. He hadn’t forgotten that I had wronged him, cast away his advice. Nor had I.
“You look younger without hair,” I said. Foolish words, but they were all I could think of at the time.
He grunted, and then in a tone that wasn’t entirely unfriendly, said, “You don’t look too bad yourself, Cassandra.” He had pointedly dropped the “Miss.” He was no longer my servant. Fair enough.
With that, a fragile peace was forged.
“I’m starved,” Kenneth declared, and the four
of us strolled away from city hall, not even waiting for the ceremony to end.
All three men had buried their medals in their pockets by the time we reached the side street. Kenneth led us to an Indian-Islamic roadside stall, where we sat on stools and wolfed down curry-dipped pratas, the tastiest of the Isle’s flatbreads. I dodged their questions about my wartime years, simply saying that I considered myself lucky. On their part, they didn’t recount the horrors at Shahbandar either. What nobody needed to say was how close they’d become. From the way they shared their food, like brothers in a poor, teeming family, it was clear they’d disavowed their prewar lives and the class differences that came with them.
In the joy of our reunion, we’d ordered enough for six and ate till our bellies nearly burst. But Kenneth was not one to let anything go to waste. While Issa tipped his leftovers on the street for a knot of hungry neighborhood cats, he took over my unfinished bowl of curry.
“I’ll eat it,” he said. Mimicking the cats, he lapped at the sauce.
For the briefest second, I glimpsed his diseased tongue. It was black and forked, split from the tip down.
He caught me. “Are you horrified?” he said, pushing the bowl away.
“No,” I lied.
“Quite all right to be, you know. I would be, too, if an old friend I hadn’t theen in a while thhowed up looking like a bloody thnake.” He laid it on thick to make his point. Then the venom faded. “Creative people, the Japsh. They thnipped it down the middle with a pair of thcissors.”
Oh, Kenneth. That he could be understood at all was clearly a supreme act of will, the result of rigorous training and the skilled avoidance of certain problem words—my name, for example.
“I’ve seen far worse,” I said.
“No doubt.” His eyes flashed with a sudden fierceness. With one ruthless, penetrating glance, he told me that he knew all about my years living in air-conditioned rooms, taking hot showers, eating square meals, and sleeping night after night with the man who’d not only murdered Mr. Wee, our mutual benefactor, but also Daniel, his friend. But how could he know? I’d said or done nothing to give myself away.