by Sharlene Teo
I hear my Aunt Yunxi walking down the corridor. She pokes her head around the door frame and smiles, eyes crinkling at her crow’s-feet.
“Go on,” she says, and this makes my hands clumsier. The dress is folded neat and flat. I hold it up against the light; it is surprisingly heavy. Light pink and cinched at the waist, bodice studded with small white beads that are meant to look like tiny pearls. Aunt Yunxi comes over and presses the length of the dress lightly against me. It reaches down to my knees. The shiny fabric is stiff and scratchy against my skin. It looks like a dress you would find on a cake-topping ornament—those plastic princesses with no legs and fine nests of golden hair. Or like a dress that a woman in her sixties thinks that teenagers would wear.
My mother and Aunt Yunxi train their eyes on me as I turn away and slip out of my uniform. My arms get stuck in my blouse and for a few seconds I wonder if I’ll be trapped in here forever, in too-tight polyester with my sticky skin and body odor emanating from my pores, a potato stench.
“A young lady should have a nice dress,” Aunt Yunxi says, fastening the clasp of the zip. I cannot breathe. I am sweating and my face is red. One minute from crying. My mother stands to my left, watching me watching myself in the mirror. The dress doesn’t fit. It makes my body look both too long and too wide. It is the color of stale candyfloss and hugs my stomach, flaring out at the hips. The bright fabric of the skirt draws attention to the scabs on my knees.
I look at myself in the mirror but avoid my own eyes.
“What’s wrong?” my mother asks. What she really means when she asks this is: What is wrong with you?
“You like or not?” Aunt Yunxi asks. “It’s the modern kind. Bought it for you from Golden Mile.”
“I love it,” I lie. “It’s really cute.”
“Good,” my mother says. “Now thank your ah yi.”
“Thanks, Aunt Yunxi.”
I bow my head, cheeks straining.
For my birthday dinner we have century eggs with sliced ginger and sesame oil. It is six o’clock. Usually we eat at seven thirty, eight. Sunlight glints through the rusty curlicues of the window grille. I stare at the drooping bougainvillea bushes in our garden as I chew. The century egg tastes both bland and piquant. I can’t stomach it. I think of swallowing an egg whole, how it would feel, gelid and aged, like a dinosaur’s eyeball lodged in my gullet. I almost gag. Outside the window, a soft mist has settled over the grass, muting the colors. I swallow and feel chalky yolk clog my throat.
“Can you smell that? The air really stinks,” I say.
“I don’t smell anything,” my mother replies.
“Me neither,” says Aunt Yunxi.
“Are you sure? It’s everywhere,” I say.
“Don’t be stupid. Shut up and eat your eggs,” my mother says.
I know better than to tell her I have no appetite.
Everyone knows that in order to transform an ordinary yolk into a century egg you must douse the uncracked shell in a salty brine of calcium hydroxide and sodium carbonate, then leave it in a plastic wrap for ten days. Zinc oxide helps to speed up the process—what would have taken months, and wood, and clay, in the slow old time before computers and digital clocks. I watch a shadow stripe the marble table: a car passing by. My mother taps her talons. After 240 hours of curing, the egg is ready. It looks like an alien embryo preserved in rotten jelly. The egg white is now translucent and yellowish, the yolk a dark, marbled gray. I slip another slice into my mouth, disgusting and familiar.
Aunt Yunxi raises her cup of tea and my mother raises a glass of wine.
“Sixteen,” they say at the same time, with the same solemn voice.
I stop chewing and stare at my dirty plate.
3
AMISA
1968
She was ten and things were changing. The war was long over; she’d been lucky to miss it. Malaya was done. The year before, there had been a two-month-long violent walkout by offices and shops that halted business on the island, and dust and dissatisfaction lingered over the shuttered windows and trashy streets of the main towns. The zinc-roofed village where she grew up was still holding on, shrinking, unproductive factories and military bases and the tourists who would flood in eventually and litter potato crisp packets and soft drinks all around. Everything would soon be different and all the worse for it. But for now Amisa was a quiet child who wanted nothing more than her own turtle or monkey, this girl who often dawdled, so lovely and seemingly slow.
She was born and had lived her whole life here in Kampong Mimpi Sedih. The houses opened into the slategreen sea that some days slopped and slurred like a drunk, but mostly it was calm, kept to itself. A mangrove swamp slurped every other corner of her neighborhood. There was no way to escape it, and it was beautiful in its own way, that wild farting water. When the wind blew sometimes her whole house stank of rotting eggs and Amisa wondered if the smell upset the chickens, reminding them of failure. How awful life must be for a chicken, she thought, to have to sit in the scorching yards all day in a downy coat you couldn’t take off, fucking and clucking to a point of focus. Imagine all your life’s work being to crap out food for other people, until you got fat and old and beheaded.
The roots of the mangroves poked out of the water like turnip stalks or witchy fingers. She didn’t play there. Not in the reeds full of stinging insects. Not amidst the secrecy of water snakes. The root palms propped up drooping trees older than anyone. Occasionally she heard big splashes at night, the sound of something flipping. It was crocodiles, or even older creatures, long-snouted or humpbacked or sharp-finned, her father said. She acted afraid, widening her eyes, because it amused him when she seemed babyish. But she knew it was just mudskippers, or the corpulent catfish that thronged the waters.
She liked to hear ghost stories from her young, handsome uncle even if she didn’t believe a word of what he said. Sometimes he talked too quickly and she didn’t fully understand, just watched his eyebrows wriggling with animation instead.
“Watch out for the orang minyak,” her uncle said. “Do you know what he does to pretty little girls like you?”
Amisa shook her head.
“He’s covered in black oil, so he can slip away if anybody tries to catch him. And late at night, he sneaks into girls’ bedrooms, and creeps under the covers with them. He has shocking white eyes, and greasy hands that go . . .”
He reached out and tickled her. Amisa shook him off, giggling feebly. His hands felt quick and damp. Close by her father stubbed out a cigarette and looked the other way.
On the other side of the island there was a grand, creaking funicular that went all the way up the hill. The lily-livered British forces had used it, and then the brutal Japanese during the war. The carriages had wooden walls and rickety doors you had to use every ounce of strength to pull open. When it wasn’t in use it was haunted, naturally. Part-time paranormal. The tracks were rusted and chipped, the color of old blood. The wind rattled the holes in the metal. The hill was full of unmarked graves. Ditto the island. Such an old place, prone to disrespect. The teenagers dared sacrilege on each other, breaking into mosques and temples, discarding cigarette butts on tombstones, kissing on sacred ground.
That year, her mother was pregnant again. Amisa’s mother was a dour former teen bride who always acted like her life was nearly over. Surely she had known how to be happy once. Was happiness something that couldn’t be unlearnt, like swimming or riding a bicycle? Amisa suspected she was at least partly instrumental in her mother’s misery. Every sibling was, but especially her. Her mother was the type of person it was impossible to imagine as having once been a child, and she imposed a laboriousness on even the smallest of things. Laughter, laundry, both duties. But who could blame her if she felt both clammy and corpselike all the time and her sparking nerves signaled hurt hurt hurt? This trimester she sprawled on the divan near the stove breathing heavily as pain bloomed and seized inside her. Because there was a small wooden stepladder to get in a
nd out of the house she could barely leave.
Amisa’s older sister, Jiejie, was also expecting. Jiejie was seventeen and had recently married the piggish lout who manned the cones at the charcoal factory. Seemingly overnight Jiejie had switched from a fun, cussing prankster to a grave woman with one hand always balanced on her growing stomach. Pregnancy scared Amisa; this swell of fear that entered through the navel and ballooned painfully outward, finally erupting in the guise of a small human.
Amisa had six brothers and they never stopped moving. They clambered around and shouted the house up to its rafters and were always getting into tussles. She liked her second youngest brother, Didi, best of all. He was a wry little shit with a capuchin countenance and a knowing way about him. Until recently, Didi had followed Amisa everywhere. From the moment he could walk he sucked his thumb with one hand and held on to her T-shirt with the other. Initially annoyed, she soon warmed to his eyes, which were like brown marbles, and the gap-toothed ineluctability of his smile. Hand in small hand they had roved the nearby marshlands, but Amisa always made sure not to take him anywhere unsafe. No deep waters, or mud holes.
Xiao Gui, she called him, Little Ghost, until her mother told her to stop because it was inauspicious. But even though now at age eight Didi considered himself too old to be trailing her everywhere, he was still her best friend, her toddling shadow. They had a similar temperament; both were mischievous and liked to steal secrets. Somebody’s shiny metal earring, taken from a windowsill, became a promise half kept. A crumpled ledger book left on a neighbor’s wooden stool was a business secret. Buttons and bottle caps pilfered from countertops were secrets that would spoil a blouse, sour fresh milk. Secretly everywhere they found these scraps of other people’s lives, the things they didn’t mean to relinquish. Didi and Amisa liked to take and share the items, turning them over in their palms, cackling at the free thrill of theft.
Nowadays, Didi made less of a show of worshipping her every move and stealing secrets with her, and he often vanished down the trail of the fleet-footed games of the other boys in the kampong. Every night before bed, however, her Little Ghost still came over and hugged her until she thought she’d run out of air, and she never got tired of his small, skinny arms around her.
Some early mornings the two of them went on birdwatching expeditions with Khim Fatt, the kindly, patient old uncle who explained to them that every flutter overhead could signal the arrival of something remarkable. Maybe a bank swallow, or a blue-eared kingfisher, or a bay owl with its serial-killer stare and tawny sheath of feathers. She liked the stillness of their pursuit, the way she and Didi would move as a unit, crouching down, taking nimble steps back when instructed, both relishing the slow, orotund voice of the uncle as he named birds, reciting when which had migrated from where.
*
Amisa was becoming beautiful, even at ten, but she had something cold about her—everybody could feel it. This coldness was incongruous in the syrupy heat. It was plain to sense, even though she was so pleasing to look at with her dark hair that curved into a doll face, and that neatly stitched smile. She had the consciousness and poise of a cute child aware of her own cuteness, which unsettled both adults and peers. There is the same unforgeable alchemy to being dislikable as to being universally loved.
Even without her accomplice, she still crept into other people’s houses and stole small tokens. Nothing of consequence: balls of hair, onion peels. She kept these on a little shelf in her room. Working alone, she was less infallible. After she was caught a few times, the family became unpopular. They were like the irresponsible owners of a cat that thieved. Even her own mother didn’t trust her. She preferred her panoply of brothers and trustworthy older sister. Amisa more closely resembled her grandmother, a haughty Peranakan beauty who had never hugged her children because she didn’t want her kebayas crumpled.
“That one has the face of a princess but the heart of an ugly sister,” Amisa’s mother whispered to her father after yet another thieving incident, and he just shook his head.
The other kids in the village shied away from her. She stared too much, took too long to respond. She looked pretty, but was she a bit stupid? they wondered. The girls called her Doll behind her back, Xiao Wa Wa, meant it meanly.
One day, Didi and her younger brothers were in the yard kicking chickens and deepening their male dialect, sniggers and innuendo they were too young to understand but absorbed from the older boys. The neighboring kids did not invite Amisa to come and play marbles. She watched them hatch their plans and when one of the girls glanced towards her window, Amisa backed away and went to help her mother peel shallots. Who needs all that? she thought.
Still, when she left the house an hour later there was a sullen sinking in her chest, and she kept away from the beach where she might find them and went to the forest instead. Here the green hum filled her ears and did not rebuke her. She liked the stilt-rooted trees and the bird’s-nest ferns with their splendidly obscene undersides of brown spores, and the deep, spongy smell of vegetation. Amisa breathed out slowly until her stomach domed a small curve, and she tried to keep walking this way with her tummy stuck out, imitating her pregnant mother and sister. After a few minutes it felt uncomfortable and she stopped. She heard rustles. Monkeys were as unavoidable as air with their pelts of faded gray and their harried expressions. She didn’t flinch when the leaves stirred, not until something clamped onto her shoulder.
When she turned around her heart jolted. There was a glistening pitch-black figure standing behind her. Amisa gulped. Her mouth went dry. Oily man. Slicked to his eyeballs. He was sinewy and loomed up like a pillar. He took his hand off her small shoulder. The whites of his eyes stood out, but the rest of his body glistened like fresh black ink. She remembered the orang minyak, the naked man who slipped through trees and fields covered in oil so he could elude the authorities. Her mother had warned her that the orang minyak could only be seen by young girls. She wasn’t sure what he did to them, only that it was bad, and that one way of fending off the oily man was for a girl to leave a pile of unwashed men’s clothing around the bed, or even to wear a man’s shirt. But it was too late for that.
“What time is it?” the man asked her in a hoarse voice. He spoke in Malay and then switched to Penang Hokkien. He had a creased face under the oil; he was older than her father. He stank like cars and sweaty feet.
“Four,” Amisa replied.
The man’s eyes darted from her head to her toes. Her hands were empty except for a marsh stalk she had been twirling idly, which she now dropped. Amisa wore a dirty white T-shirt and frayed khaki shorts with pockets, but they contained only a garlic husk and a bobby pin. She clenched and unclenched her hands. Something rustled on the other side of her. She felt like an alert animal: hairs standing, her hands and feet cold despite the heavy heat.
A woman emerged from the foliage. She too was covered in oil, her flattened hair trailing past her shoulders. She looked like she was wearing similar clothes to the man under the mess. Now Amisa was truly scared; with that hair the woman could have been a langsuir, or a hantu pontianak. But when she smiled, she displayed a mouth of straight, shiny teeth and her eyes twinkled. She said to the man in Hokkien:
“She’s just a little girl, she’s got nothing.”
The man glanced from the woman to Amisa with a look that wasn’t hostile, just tired. It was not only oil that covered them; they were caked in mud, swamp detritus, possibly shit, judging from how they smelt. She stared at their bare feet. The man’s toenails were all smashed up.
The woman put her hands on her knees and leaned in to Amisa.
“Listen, what’s your name?” she asked in a light, calm voice. “We don’t mean to scare you.”
“Xiaofang,” Amisa replied. Her face reddened; she should have lied.
“You’re such a pretty girl, Xiaofang. Can you do us a favor? We really need your help. Do you live far from here?”
Amisa hesitated, and then shook her head.
<
br /> “Can you bring us something to eat? It doesn’t have to be much. And a rag if you can find it, just a long piece of cloth. If you’re a good girl, I’ll give you a reward.”
The man turned to the woman abruptly and shot her a glare. He threw up his hands, noticed Amisa watching, and put them down. The woman nodded, as if to shush him.
“Do you think you can do that for me? Can you keep a secret?”
Amisa nodded seriously. She could keep secrets very well.
“Good,” the woman said, and beamed again. She jutted her chin out as if to indicate permission to leave.
Amisa backed away one step at a time, snapping tiny twigs as she retreated. The oily man and woman watched her, eyes ablaze, still as statues. When she was eight paces away she turned and broke into a run, helter-skelter nonstop, no chance if she could help it for four oily hands to grab her. She went so fast her breath heaped ragged. The undergrowth was uneven and unkind, scratching her shins.
By the time she got back to the kampong her T-shirt was drenched in sweat and her legs were covered in cuts.
“What’s wrong with you?” her mother called out without looking at her.
Amisa shook her head and shivered. Her mother had shuttered the windows. Outside, the sun still exclaimed from the middle of the sky, winking through the slats from time to time.
She winced. One of the cuts on her right leg was deep and it smarted. She sat on the wooden floor with its slanted boards and sole-prints, one filthy leg curled towards her and the injured one extended. She examined the cut on the inside of her leg, just by her knee, pressing it together with her thumb and index finger: blood oozed. She kept pressing until it stopped, the pain sharp and hypnotic.
“Ah!” Amisa cried out.
Her mother shifted and clicked her tongue. “Be quiet. Stop disturbing me,” she muttered in Hakka. “Just leave me alone.”