by Sharlene Teo
“Are you sure it’s there?” my mother asked the radiologist with a voice both plaintive and angry. He didn’t even nod. I looked away and at my aunt Yunxi instead. She was staring out of the window with a glaze in her eyes, fixed upon the car park and the rain trees. She had the same expression she took on during a séance, when she was trying to make urgent contact beyond the room. Was she wondering why she hadn’t sensed something was wrong? I thought of Aunt Yunxi pressing her palms on the bowed backs of clients, on a hopeful head, but this clinically well-lit room did not seem to hold the promise of some hokey, mystical healing.
We thought it was just one lawless tumor but the problem was bigger than that, and it moved with such vicious speed. My mother was a semifamous monster and I thought she’d live forever. Could I have warned her months, years, a decade earlier? Could I have had the foresight to tell her: Stop living complacently? Did I have the guts to phrase it, and would she have listened?
I am sixteen and a half and beginning to realize that life sometimes happens like this: quickly, with no further allowances. You think you have decades ahead of you and all of a sudden there is no time left.
11
AMISA
1977
Six months after they started courting, Wei Loong took Amisa to the Satay Club. While he went to order she sat on a wooden bench overlooking the river and stared out at the water, dark as oil. Her arms and legs ached. It wasn’t just the long shifts at work; increasingly, she found it draining being around other people all day. To think that she had grown up in a crowded kampong and now the only serenity she felt was in a darkened theatre. She was only nineteen. With age, would her misanthropy worsen like a chronic condition? She felt separate yet shamefully like the other girls who sat on adjacent benches waiting for their beaus, smoothing out their skirts, adjusting the buckles on their patent shoes.
Wei Loong came over with a paper plate piled with satay. Amisa took a stick and tore a nub of burnt mutton off with her teeth. She chewed with cowboy consternation. Smoke from the charcoal grills wafted over.
“Did you call home this week?”
She wiped grease from her lips. “Yeah, Didi wasn’t around. The auntie down the road taught my Jie how to make kueh tutus and now she’s obsessed. She can’t stop making them. My second brother has a girlfriend. Everyone else is the same.” In truth, Jie was the only one she spoke to. Her parents hardly ever came to the phone, and when they did, the conversations were stilted and brief. She had a lingering, guilt-born worry that they would ask about the bangle she had stolen.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Have you heard back?”
Wei Loong shrugged. “You know how my brothers are,” he said, even though she’d never met them. “Ah goons and ah sengs, all of them. Only want to borrow money, now that Ah Luat gave me promotion.”
“Money, then talk,” Amisa said. She felt full now, and a little nauseous. She moved her tongue around the inside of her mouth and dislodged a piece of gristle from her left molar. She didn’t want to appear unladylike so she swallowed it.
*
Later in bed, Wei Loong twirled her hair in his hand. She fidgeted out of his grasp before leaning back against him. There was a very tall, ancient ficus tree that she could see from his sixth-storey window. At 10 p.m. its long branches were backlit by the amber squares and punctuations of people at home. The tree was considered sacred, with a shrine underneath its boughs. She liked the look of it, grand and incongruous against the skyline of scaffolding and construction cranes.
“Move in with me, Amisa,” Wei Loong mumbled into her hair. He said her name like an exotic fruit. Sex cast a particularly soporific spell over him. He had the long, low drawl of a sleep-talker.
“Maybe,” she replied in a syrupy voice. “I’m so tired. I can’t believe I’ve got to get up at three.”
“Quit the seafood stall.”
“I can’t just do that,” she laughed.
“ ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ ” he mimicked.
She laughed, a little less enthusiastically this time, still staring out of the window. She heard him draw his breath.
“Marry me,” he said.
Amisa turned towards Wei Loong. He was serious. She took in his softened eyes with their deep epicanthal folds, his pockmarks and sharp nose. He was so good to her that it felt traitorous to recall her initial repulsion. She pressed her mouth against his in intimate panic. He put his arms around her, tilting her fully towards him, and reached for her breasts. She felt his tongue part her lips and slide around, this fat tender worm stubbed to a stem. She thought of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman with their close-lipped kisses, crisp shifting profiles, the epic idea of epic romance. And then, incongruously, she pictured her own mother back in their dingy, herb-scattered kitchen, wondering about what disrespectable deed her daughter was up to, if she even wondered at all.
*
The next afternoon there was a fire scare at the cinema and it had to be evacuated. Besides the time she had fallen ill after her birthday, Amisa was never free at this hour. As she walked home, light on her tired feet, she jangled her keys in her dusty pocket. Outside her house, she saw a middle-aged woman standing in the street. The woman clutched a young boy by the shoulders. They stood apart when Amisa neared. The boy looked about eleven, knock-kneed and with a pale, rabbity countenance and a chapped mouth.
“Excuse me,” the woman called out as Amisa reached her front door. “Does Datuk Aunt Yunxi live here? Is this the right address?”
She showed Amisa a piece of paper. Amisa nodded.
“Yes. Are you her family?” She studied the woman’s wan face. She bore no resemblance to Yunxi.
“Oh, no,” the woman replied. “I’ve come to consult her, about my son.” The boy stared at the ground.
“Um, sure, I’ll show you in,” Amisa replied. She frowned as she led the visitors up the narrow stairs, floorboards creaking in protest at the footfalls behind her.
At the top floor she showed the woman and boy into the kitchen. They waited gingerly by the hanging wok and a garland of onions.
“Just give me a second,” Amisa said. She stood outside Yunxi’s door and leaned in. She heard a mournful, gravelly chanting coming from inside the room. It frightened her.
“Yunxi? Some people are here to see you.”
The chanting stopped. When Yunxi answered the door she was wearing a dark gray samfoo fastened by toggles. Her face was flushed and full of deepened lines that Amisa hadn’t noticed so clearly before.
“Yes, of course. Please show them in,” Yunxi said, her voice echoing out onto the cramped landing. Her Chinese intonations sounded almost oratorical.
Amisa went back into the kitchen and ushered the woman and boy towards Yunxi’s room. The woman shut the door behind the boy. Amisa poured herself a glass of water and gulped it quickly. She wasn’t hungry, just sleepy, as usual. She was taking a break from Wei Loong this evening. Betrothal felt like a strain in the arms. What did it really mean to be engaged? She walked over to her room and shut the door. Lying on her tiny bed in half a daydream and dirty clothes was her favorite thing to do. The pictures behind her eyelids were infinitely better than the cobwebs across the beams of the ceiling or the sooty shutters. She listened out but could hear nothing through the walls.
Her thoughts drifted to a bow-tied blouse, mauvecolored and made of silk, that she had seen an elegant woman wearing on Havelock Road. The woman’s hair was flipped out at the corners. Amisa imagined being that woman, getting into a yellow-top taxi with a casual, privileged grace—one stockinged leg piled delicately after the other.
After an hour the door next to hers opened. Amisa kept her eyes shut but her ears peeled.
“Good-bye, Laoshi,” the boy said meekly, his voice cracking. Perhaps he, too, was older than she thought.
“Thank you, thank you,” the woman said in Hokkien.
After they had gone down the stairs Amisa couldn’t take it any longer. She
got up and peered around the corner into the kitchen. Yunxi was taking down the wok.
“Hello! I don’t usually see you home at this time,” Yunxi said in her ordinary voice.
“There was a fire scare.”
“Ah. Of course. You are an Earth Dog, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?” Amisa asked, rubbing her eyes.
“You were born in 1958, the year of the Earth Dog. Today is an unlucky day for you.” Yunxi began chopping an onion, working deftly with the little knife.
“I never asked you what you do for a living. I assumed—”
Yunxi looked at her patiently.
“With all those male clients—”
“Ah. Hah!” Yunxi said, the blade clanging staccatos on the wooden board. Instead of anger, her face erupted into a grin. “I can’t believe you thought I was selling my body like that.” She laughed, a bawdy, throaty chortle. “You could say I am using my body, but in a different way.”
“How so?”
“I have always had a gift, but my Laoshi helped me to refine it, many years ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I am a medium. I get possessed by the spirits of the dead, the gods of roadsides, anthills, trees. Those men who visit are desperate—just not in the way you assumed.”
“Ah,” Amisa said.
Yunxi nodded at her and smiled. A slight breeze wound its way through the accordion window. Amisa thought of the boy who had just left, knock-kneed and very thin. She wondered what haunted him.
*
The next week she quit her job at the wet market. Quitting was so easy when it was presented as an option. Mrs. Lim handed her an ang pao. Mr. Lim smiled gingerly.
“Good luck and take care,” he said, and turned back towards the piles of prawns.
“I will do,” Amisa replied, staring at the pink, pitiable eyes of a sardine in front of her.
She took off her cap and stained apron. Her ponytail lay flat and greasy against her skull. She handed the things back to Mrs. Lim and walked away from the stall, smiling and waving to the uncles and aunties as she went by. She untied her hair and teased it up with her fingers. She felt like punching the strung-up bunches of Chinese sausages as she passed. Outside, the rest of the city was just warming up. A paper mask seller pedaled past her with his trishaw loaded full of craft masks and puppets. Mickey Mouse, a donkey head, and an operatic male face with upward-slanted brows bobbed away from her. She got out the ang pao from her pocket and opened it. Inside was S$20.
The next day she went with Wei Loong to Fort Canning. At the marriage registry she signed her name in shaky characters and watched as he followed with his own. Ng Wei Loong. She was an Ng now, too.
Their wedding took place three months later, on 9 July 1977. It was a small and simple ceremony, without fuss or fanfare. On the day it rained, but she thought nothing of it, wasn’t superstitious. Yunxi and Laoshi attended, and some of Wei Loong’s friends, inoffensive childhood classmates with meek wives of their own. She kept a peaceable distance from them, a faint smile on her face.
“Your friends are boring,” she whispered to Wei Loong.
“Yunxi looks like scrap wood,” he replied.
“How dare you say that?”
“Fine, she looks like a violin. A priceless collectible.”
“That’s better.”
Amisa wore a bloodred qipao stitched with little flowers. It was tailor-made in Chinatown and Wei Loong had saved up for it for months. When she emerged into the void deck wearing it, he looked like he wanted to cry.
“Mei nu,” he said, and she winced inside, because he sounded just like those awful men in the alleyways. “I am so lucky. I could stare at your face forever.”
Amisa contemplated her new husband. She couldn’t picture him any older than thirty, nor herself, either. Youth felt expansive, bulk-bought, and useful, like an endless supply of tissue paper.
She wrote to her family after the fact to tell them: Guess what, I’m married. He’s a nice man. He makes a decent living. He doesn’t hurt me. She asked after Didi. A letter arrived back from her sister: Didi was working in Genting Highlands, and had taken up a gambling habit at the grand old age of sixteen. Everyone was in good health, and happy for her. Parents sent their regards, Jiejie said.
Two days after the wedding she packed her things to move out of her room. Yunxi helped her, even though she had very few belongings.
“Do you think it is strange, or unlucky, that I didn’t ask my family to attend?” Amisa asked.
“You have your own reasons. They understand,” Yunxi said in the tiny space on the staircase landing.
“Yes,” Amisa said doubtfully. A pair of cockroaches scampered away out of the corner of her vision, into Yunxi’s room.
Yunxi pressed a small, greenish medallion into Amisa’s hands.
“This is for good luck and a happy marriage,” she said.
“I’ll still see you?” Amisa asked.
“Of course,” Yunxi replied, and fixed her with a small, warm smile. “You know where to find me.”
“Thank you,” Amisa replied, embarrassed by how moved she was. “I’d better go.”
*
Wei Loong’s flat, and now hers, was in Toa Payoh, near to Geylang and a busy public housing town, bordered by eight old Chinese cemeteries. There was a wide parched plot of grassland opposite their development where on some nights secret society gangs staked their turf. But it was still more of a family area than Geylang, full of maciks and their grandchildren, fabric stores and coffee shops, and most mornings the smell of fresh otah and kopi o gifted the air.
When she woke up every morning the first thing he did was kiss her on the nose and then hungrily on the mouth before she could catch her breath. He mauled her lovingly like it was his last day on earth. He told her over and over how lucky he felt. He said this so many times the compliment lost its meaning. He filled in Toto tickets every week with her birthdate, 23081958, and bonus numbers for the date they got together: 190476. He doted on her, his lucky little lottery number. When he sensed her annoyance he went out to the market and brought her back breakfast, lunch, or dinner: little baos or kueh lapis, nasi lemak, chicken chok, ban mian, murtubak, whatever she wanted.
Seemingly overnight, Amisa gained five kilos and felt appalled, but even she had to admit that the new weight made her look even better. Her hair acquired a glossier sheen. She became invincibly beautiful: the clarity of her cheeks, her little ankles, and the lucid poetry others projected onto her blank expression. People stopped by the box office just to catch a glimpse of her. She was locally legendary, at nineteen: something mythic, this unendurably lovely girl in full bloom. Even stray dogs and children smiled at her, but she didn’t return the favor.
Wei Loong worked as an antiques restorer in Bartley Road. The workshop smelt of earthy fragrant teak and varnish. The first time Amisa visited, the four other men working there put down their tools and looked from this goddess to Wei Loong and back, gawking with incredulity.
“Wah lau, you’re so lucky,” they said to Wei Loong, right in front of her.
“Don’t I know it,” Wei Loong said. Amisa bristled like a peacock in her orange-patterned shift dress and go-go boots.
Orphans together, both of them. She could be happy this way, as long as nothing changed; as long as they never grew sick or old and nobody burnt or burgled the largish room with a laundry pole poking out of the window, the unmade bed, and the beige walls. Wei Loong wasn’t rich, but he wasn’t dirt-poor, either. He wasn’t a stud, but he wasn’t a little anchovy, either. He wasn’t interesting, but he wasn’t totally boring, either. His unhappy childhood had taken care of that, and it was a spite they shared, something that stung and bruised them in similar places. His father had walked out of the house when Wei Loong was seven, a philandering sailor. His brothers were in prison or left a contraband trail across the neighboring countries. She could have had her pick of literally anyone but it took less energy to remind
herself: at least he had plucked up the courage to talk to her.
If love was someone real who treated her like a princess, then this was clearly it. Wasn’t a good marriage the jack-pot for traditional Chinese girls? It was nice to be held. Checked up on, asked after. Amisa felt as if she could relax into such an existence. The sex was decent. They were careful. She didn’t want any children yet, and he didn’t rush her. They drank together some evenings at the nearby hawker center. He made for better company when slightly intoxicated; he became surer of himself and more witty and animated. He toasted her and cracked rude little innuendoes until a glow rose up in her cheeks and alcohol swirled through her veins and made everything softer.
12
SZU
2003
It’s been one day since my mother died. Excused from school, I spend all morning lying in bed, overhearing traffic and the birds outside changing their tunes. In the afternoon Aunt Yunxi gives me instant permission to stay over at Circe’s house. She is too tired and busy to quibble. My aunt has always been made of sterner and more mysterious stuff than me. We both know I am flimsier, that I can’t bear the sight of my mother’s bedroom one door down from my own, with its oval mirror that questions the hallway and the slight indent in the memory-foam mattress from where she folded her slim body.