by Sharlene Teo
I blink slowly at her. “It,” I think. What is this “it” she is referring to? A parasite? She doesn’t know “it” any more than I do, but right now I am practicing how to lower my heart rate. I quieten my breath. I imagine that I am a spread of butter, applying myself to my examination paper, smearing it in oily yellow. I picture the scrawny number on my script bending and warping into something magnificent. An impressive 88, a stately 92, perfect 100 for all the right equations, or even beyond that—if she gave me 120 percent, because I was exceptional and also because she adored my personality. I could then carry the extra 20 percent over into another one of my weak, wheezing grades, boost it stronger. Everyone would be happy.
“How are you coping?” Mrs. Fok asks.
“Huh? Sorry?”
She sighs.
“How are you coping with revision?”
“Um. Revision is okay.”
This is a lie, because in order for revision to happen one must have gone through everything at least once over. My workbooks and file folders remain untouched under my desk in the classroom. I can see the crisp, clean papers gathering dust and bacteria.
The guilt makes my tongue fatten in my mouth. Saliva pools underneath it. Perhaps I will drool. I glance away from her, I am a hangdog; Mrs. Fok knows it. She sighs and crosses her arms and I stare at her scuffed black shoes. Her tired feet and angry arms have made the right assessment: I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve, I can’t even string long words together. What does this girl know about anything? she must wonder. I hope my daughter doesn’t turn out as useless as her.
She dismisses me. We draw our faces into small, straight smiles. We say good-bye and walk in different directions—I towards my schoolbag, she towards her mountain of scripts.
The eyes in the back of my head narrow at Mrs. Fok. The mouth in my brain hisses at her: I hate you and your stupid subject. I hope you get cancer. I hope you don’t survive it.
As I walk out of the yellow gates my palms ache and my legs are heavy with the weight of my birthday. How is it possible that anyone could celebrate this, throw a party where people look at them, giving a thumbs-up as they crookedly cut a cake? How could anyone actually enjoy being one year closer to a bad back, to sleeplessness, to gums drawing away from yellowed canines? Even with the bait of wisdom, old age still depresses me. I dread the day when my mouth is frozen into a life-formed snarl and I can no longer keep up with shitty pop music.
My bus arrives with a hiss. As I get on I think, How about this for a change—if every year, instead of wearing out and scarring the same awkward skin I could wake up with a fresh one. Shed my tall self like a snake. It would be the best present. I wish I could go away and become someone else, again and again. But I have at least two more years of necessary education, and it is only Tuesday.
2
SZU
2003
We have always lived in this cul-de-sac. It is located at the leafy, surprising end of the road, and sometimes people wander down here and are disappointed that there is nowhere else to go. They shake their heads and retrace their steps.
I push open the rusty orange gates and drag my feet down the path. I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want to be outside either. Everywhere stinks. When I alighted from the number 67 at the overhead bridge and began my walk back I almost retched. The air reeks of rotten eggs or burnt barbecue. If the other people at the bus stop had not been coughing and gagging as well I would be worried that I have a brain tumor.
No matter how many times my mother and aunt make me rake up the soggy leaves, the driveway never looks any better. The garden is overrun with weeds. All day long the crickets and cicadas won’t shut up. We adopted a dog when I was ten, a scruffy white terrier, ostensibly to replace my dad. First I called him Egg, and then Kueh-Kueh. I finally settled on Biscuit. Biscuit used to yap and yap when I returned from school. He made a real racket for such a small guy: a four-legged home security system. Always so happy to see me. Silly twinkling eyes and a stuck-out pink tongue. Four years ago I was crossing the road opposite the cul-de-sac. Someone had left the gate slightly ajar: a crying client, perhaps. Biscuit charged towards me, paws pounding down the asphalt, just as a 20-ton lorry trundled down the road. For once, he didn’t make a sound. Now he is a bare spot at the end of the garden, by the banana trees.
We keep an old frangipani tree and two shedding bougainvillea bushes in the garden. I say “keep” but what I really mean is that these things exist, refusing to die even though we do not tend to them. The bougainvilleas are perpetually out of bloom, white and pink petals curled by heat, sodden with rain, and the frangipani tree sheds all year.
Our house itself is very old. My dad won the Toto lottery the year before I was born and they bought this place in the eighties, which is why we could afford a landed property. The building is flat and ugly, almost like a military barrack. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Japanese used to torture people here during the war. Sometimes the wind makes the walls howl and during monsoon storms the roof rattles, as if to shake off a bad dream. The waterstained outer walls look like they have been slapped with long strokes of weak gray paint. It stinks of cigarettes, incense, and my aunt’s slow-boiled fungus soup. Everything is yellowing: every wall, every tile, every window.
When I get in I see the copper bell placed on the brass dish on the table. This means that we have a guest. The reception room is small and narrow with peeling wallpaper, cream flecked with jade. The altar is lit with two peanut-oil lamps in their lotus-shaped holders, flanked by four melted candles, red wax pooled on the dusty wrapping paper. Today it is set up with an offering of dried sponge cake, five oranges, and a shallow dish of perfume. At the center of the altar a rotation of deities and immortals stares from the eyes of idols or picture frames. If a client is around we light incense, bow our heads respectfully, invite him or her to join us in worship. My aunt mutters something under her breath. We kneel and touch our foreheads to the ground, all three of us. We wait until our guest begins to shift his or her body weight, squirming in polite discomfort. This can take anything between five and fifteen minutes. And then my aunt moves to ring the bell. We get up and she collects the “door departure fee,” which is additional to payment and presented in a brown envelope. We see the person out of the door, our three female voices plaintive and gentle, our three different but related faces hovering by the grilled metal gate. Dialect, Mandarin, English, we’ve got it covered. Good-bye, good-bye, see you another day.
The amber bulb above the door frame is switched on, which means that the session is still in progress and I have to keep very quiet. I untie my canvas shoes and arrange them on the rack. I strain my ears to listen out for voices, but all I can hear is the unsteady surge and babble of the filter from the fish tank in the kitchen. I walk down the hallway and stop in front of the dark-brown door. I put my ear against it.
Aunt Yunxi is mumbling in a low monotone. She is speaking in dialect. It sounds like Hakka.
The client is making sounds of assent. Today it is a very old woman with a dry throat.
Aunt Yunxi does not allow any water in that room.
“But why?” I once asked.
“You’ve got to keep people thirsty,” she replied, and smiled. Thin, pursed lips. No teeth.
At the end of the hallway is my mother’s bedroom door. It is shut, as usual, with no light coming from the gap underneath. I wonder if she is asleep, or if she is in the session room with my aunt and the client. My mother takes part in the sessions if the client has a lot of money or possesses desperate and excessive spending potential. She is an expert at discerning whom to target. It is not always the clients who are the best dressed or well coiffed, nor the ones who drive an Audi or Lexus, parked all shiny and out of place on our soggy driveway. Someone could turn up naked, or wearing rags, and smelling like shit, and my mother would still know if it was the right person.
“It’s all in the face,” she says. “A sad face is an open
wallet.”
One day I will learn to be as expertly cruel as she is. She finds the weakness she wants behind the eyes, tucked within crow’s-feet and worry lines, all that fear and blind hope transmitted in the smallest tics and gestures. People are unaware of how much they want their weakness to be exploited, how much they want to be punished for being themselves. My mother locates the finest pinpoint of pain and presses on it. She promises these people everything, and she is so wonderful to look at, so dazzling and persuasive, that a few of them have even agreed to bring over their life savings. Both men and women fall a little bit in love with her. They present their love in fifty- and hundred- and thousand-dollar denominations, bundles of blue and red and brown, stuffed into plastic bags.
Aunt Yunxi stands off to one side during these transactions, eyes clouded over, in the throes of a trance. She is the medium after all, the giving conduit. Thank you, the clients say, after their loved one has once again departed, with a whimper and a howl, and my aunt’s trembling body has gone still. She flops down towards the lace tablecloth like a rag doll.
Tears stream down the clients’ cheeks. Thank you, thank you, thank you, they say in Mandarin, Hakka, Teochew, Hokkien, English. After the session is over their leftover grief, for there is always too much, billows out over the room like a used parachute. My aunt lights a stick of star anise incense and opens the window.
“Did you see that? How happy that old man was?” she asks me. “That went so well.” Her face is gleeful. “Were you paying attention?”
Depending on the time of day and the angle, Aunt Yunxi looks anything between fifty and a hundred years old. She is as fit as a fiddle. In all the time that I have known her I have never heard her sneeze even once. She appeared on our doorstep nine years ago: 1994, the year my father walked out. My mother is the last person to ask for help or admit that she is struggling. She is too proud. But Yunxi simply knew. Call it sibling intuition. She swept into our lives after having traveled half the world. A tiny Singaporean woman in her fifties, all on her own on the Trans-Siberian Railway. All she brought with her was one beat-up rattan suitcase and a spindly purple umbrella.
The truth is that my Aunt Yunxi is half woman, half violin. She screeches, she is narrow and stiff. She holds her arms out at odd angles, as if they don’t belong to her. This is partly due to rheumatism but also an affectation. She is shrewd and shrill. Yet from time to time she is capable of emitting clear, startling notes of sweetness. She is the only person who buys me presents. When I was very young, and a long time before I would finally meet her, my father told me the story.
“Your mother will be too embarrassed to tell you this,” he said. “Or she will think you are too young to know. But I don’t.”
He said that Yunxi was a made-up name. She wasn’t even a person but actually a rare violin, a Lipinski Stradivarius, the only nontouring Stradivarius in Southeast Asia. There were so few of these left in the world that you could count them on your fingers, and each model was signed and numbered. My mother had stolen it from a music college (“How?” I asked, and my father replied that “how” was irrelevant) and disguised the priceless instrument as a woman, an older sister. And so the violin became this woman with frizzy white hair and liver spots across her cheeks, and fingers so thin and brittle that they look like they will fall off at any moment.
“All this is true,” he said, and tapped his nose.
My father loved old furniture. For years, he worked in an antiques dealer’s shop as a repairman and apprentice restorer. After he won the lottery, he didn’t have to work anymore, but his love of antiques remained, his passionate hobby. He used to lull me to sleep with his long-winded, rhapsodic explanations about how a corner chair was made, its foresty provenance. Everything smooth was hewn from raw matter. Heartwood was hard and heavy. Mahogany bled a mess. Bean trees stretched into some abstract Thai sky. Dad spent so long in the workshop that he always smelt of wood shavings and the heady tang of what I came to recognize as paint thinner. He had a distinct smell, of that much I’m sure. Wax and wood and sweaty collars, beer. And then one day, when I was eight, he drove away and didn’t come back. He disappeared so decisively it must have been after much contemplation, brewing in his head like slow-cooked stock, this wanting to leave. Or was it easy for him?
In my dreams my father is as real as I can remember. I always wake up both maddened and warmed by the sight of him. He has slopey shoulders, and he is neither tall nor short, with a broad, pockmarked face and a frown print between his eyebrows. He was always asking my mother in hushed Mandarin what was wrong. Something was always wrong. With her, with them, with me. His voice is vague. What I have is a paternal approximation, borrowed from daytime soaps. No recordings exist of him. Voices are the first things to go. Next, speech patterns. The turn of a phrase. What was meant as a joke and what was wisdom? You don’t get to choose what sticks and what fades. Over time even silly untruths gain weight and sprout meanings, like mold on fruit.
*
If anyone asks exactly what my mother and Aunt Yunxi do, I’ve been instructed to say that they operate a small private business from home without employing any additional workers. They provide holistic wellness services. This includes transformative coaching and mind-body practices. My aunt learnt a lot of these practices from her travels all over China, Mongolia, India, and Nepal. I can’t go into much detail because services tend to vary due to the needs of each client.
My mother and aunt trade in hope. The fact that people come to them already guarantees half their success; these people want to believe in what they’ve paid for. To seek us out, to note our address and be confused by the cul-de-sac, to wander tentatively down the driveway, that takes inordinate amounts of hopefulness. Some would call it desperation. The final-spurt effort of the last resort. Most of our clients are waiting to be consoled by the achingly familiar voices of the dead. They feel left behind and they want to be told what to do next. These people assume that the afterlife guarantees wisdom and foresight.
Only twice have we encountered incidents of clients complaining, calling Aunt Yunxi’s bluff. Storming out of the bungalow after throwing a fistful of fifty-dollar notes on the antique table. I felt a kind of vindication both times it happened, a swelling in my chest, the spectator’s fascination with trouble. Aunt Yunxi is a pro. She always keeps her low voice calm. She sounds like she is always in the right.
“I am sorry you feel this way.”
Reply: “You’re a scam artist, a joke.”
“We can’t work with this kind of energy.”
Reply: “You are full of shit.”
The clients reserve their swear words, their foul language, for Yunxi. It is easier for them to raise their voices at this small, sallow woman with sticks for arms and a pinched, beady-eyed face. Their anger is never directed at my mother, who takes the slightest cue—a narrowing of the eyes, a choked voice—to retreat with the measured, backwards steps of a dancer. She trained in a youth dance troupe as a teenager. When I was little she told me I should do the same, but by the time I was nine I kept knocking into things, and every year my height sprang up, until puberty happened, this rambling gait.
*
The screech of a chair jolts me away from the door and into the darkened kitchen. I have taken off my socks and my toes are cold on the tiles. I stare at the large, dirty fish tank. The big-eye croaker and the two saddle grunts open and close their mouths, silver fins shimmering in the murky water. The milkfish is dying; its eyes are a curious shade of red and it swims too slowly, with unease, as if it will tip over at any moment.
I open the fridge door as my aunt and the client pass by in the hallway.
“But will things change?” the client asks in Mandarin. “Will I feel better?” Her voice is shaky. I cannot bear to look at her.
“Things always change,” my aunt replies in her sage, show-womanly voice. “It is the way of the moon, the light and flow. Change is the only constant.”
I roll my ey
es at the fridge, which is so full that it looks like it will overflow. My aunt loves to cook. Leafy greens wrapped in newspaper, shrink-wrapped Chinese sausages, bolster pillows of tofu. From the wet market: red dates in a sickly pink juice, belachan in little jars. I am just looking. I call this the eyeball diet. Ocular calisthenics. No harm, no guilt just to look. Sometimes I squeeze the food, knead the tofu, poke the pig meat, tap the princely jar of Khong Guan biscuits. That’s it. I am glaring so hard that my vision blurs.
“Ah girl. How was your day?” my mother asks.
I shut the door and turn towards her. She is wearing a blue pajama set. Frayed silk blouse and long trousers. Her face is sharp and bright. She has never needed to diet.
“Not bad,” I reply. I do not hold her gaze.
“I haven’t forgotten,” my mother says. “Just in case you thought I forgot your birthday.”
She comes over and presses her head against my neck. I flinch. Her cheek reaches my shoulder. She puts her arms around me and squeezes my fat. Her sharp red nails dig into my school uniform. If not for the pain this proximity would seem unreal. How tiny her wrists are: fix-a-watch-strap small, custom-made bracelet. How could this woman ever have contained me? Every day she is shrinking, not just getting thinner but losing density. Growing slighter, pellucid. Soon she will dissolve completely and I won’t be able to remember the shape she leaves in a door frame.
“Aunt Yunxi has a surprise for you,” my mother says into my shoulder. I don’t want to move; I feel like I might tip her over. I can’t breathe.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see,” my mother says.
She shepherds me into my room. Sunlight is streaming a cone of dust motes onto my bed. There is a rectangular white box in the middle of it. Long and straight like a doll’s coffin. I try to undo the blue ribbon, which is tied tightly around it, but there is a dead knot so I have to use scissors. I slide off the cover and push aside the layers of tissue wrapping. Something that takes this much effort to uncover must be expensive.