by Tash Aw
Not long ago I read something on Facebook that talked about minimum wages for migrant workers. I don’t know how it came up on my Facebook – usually it’s a lot of links to Joel Osteen videos or other devotional stuff, or badminton or soccer – but this time it was an article about how some people in KL, a human rights group or something, were trying to establish basic rights for the millions of foreigners working here. Of course they were going to fail! Even I could have told them that. They kept complaining about the lack of political will – government this, government that. What struck me and made me shake my head was all the nonsense they said about money. Migrant wages are degrading, they humiliate the soul. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t the pay that destroyed the spirits of these men and women, it was the work – the way it broke their bodies before they could even contemplate the question of salaries. The way it turned them from children to withered old creatures in the space of a few years. Anyone can work with their body like that for a year, two years, maybe even more. But when those years stretch out before you like the sea on a calm hot day, waveless, with no change or variety – when that kind of life becomes your only future, that’s when you flee. Even if someone pays you ten thousand a month, your body won’t accept it. Your mind tells you to stay, to earn money for your kids back home, your old parents who need help. But your body says: Run.
The first few months, I worked with the foreigners, sometimes even getting into the water to fix the cages with them, or carrying ten tons of sand from one end of the land to the other in wheelbarrows when we were constructing the office and other farm buildings. We wore loose-fitting shirts to protect us from the sun, but later, when the sun had gone down and we were bathing, I could see how our bodies were marked by the sun – the skin on our faces, necks and hands was three shades darker than the rest of ourselves, as if it belonged to someone else, a person less fortunate than us. I took to tying a small towel around my neck to keep the sun from burning me. I knotted it at the front, so that I could untie it easily to wipe the sweat from my face, and the men started to make fun of me. Hey Mr Cowboy, they joked. John Wayne just came to work!
One day Mr Lai arrived and found me mixing concrete with the Indonesian labourers. I heard him shouting even before he stopped the car. He rolled down the window. ‘Why you waste your time doing this kind of work? Go check the generators, check the inventory – something useful.’ I stared at him, blinking. Sweat was dripping into my eyes and suddenly I felt very hot. ‘Stare what? Foreman also do this dirty work? Give them instructions already can, no need to join in.’ The word foreman stayed in my head as I washed myself in the makeshift shower we’d built in the shade of some trees. The newness of the word spun gently in my head, as clear as the sunlight that was filtering through the thin canopy of leaves above, falling around me like shards of splintered glass. Maybe there was something wrong with my eyes that day, maybe I’d been working too long in the sun.
I understood that I would hold power over other human beings – that it was possible for me to impose my will on the actions of men who were just like me, whose bodies worked like mine, whose desperation and joy I not only recognised but shared. Were we friends? Of course not. I never went to their lodgings, they never came to mine. In the evenings they disappeared into the night, and I withdrew to my own space. We understood that we would never be buddies, but somehow that drew us together. Friendship is not a requirement for closeness. During the day, those long, long days under the sun and rain, we experienced pain in the same way, and satisfaction and laughter too, but mostly hardship, and that is what bound us.
Now, someone had given me the right to tell these men what to do. In the space of a few seconds, we were no longer the same – perhaps we never had been, and I had been a fool to think otherwise. It sounds stupid, but all at once I did feel different from them. As I walked back to the grey concrete box that housed the office, I looked at the men shovelling sand and cement, wheeling barrowloads of hardcore, carrying sacks of grit on their shoulders. Not one of them looked up at me – they just continued in exactly the same way. It was as if they knew that something had changed, that I had detached from their world, and no longer belonged to it. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like calling out to them, making a joke about Adi’s permanent limp or how Bayu couldn’t stop talking while he worked – the usual bad jokes that we made all the time. But it didn’t feel right. A space had opened up between us, and they recognised it as much as I did. Mr Lai was nearby, walking down to the jetty, and if I’d called out to the men and joked with them, he’d have heard and said something nasty. I had no choice but to walk on.
I tucked my shirt into my trousers and went into the office. All around me there were piles of papers and files containing bills, invoices. I opened a folder and stared at the words and numbers that meant nothing to me. Soon, in just a few months’ time, I’d learn how to decipher what was going on, but I never completely forgot the panic that I experienced that first day. You won’t understand that feeling – being powerless in front of a sheet of paper. I told myself, It’s just a stupid piece of paper. The last time I saw so many pages of numbers or words I was at school, and that had been years ago. Even then, I’d been defeated by them – more or less flunked my SPM, even got a D in Chinese and mathematics. Only got one good grade, in history – C4 – which was a joke, because the past means nothing to me. Nothing. All across the country, probably no one failed as badly as I did. Seventeen years old, couldn’t wait to leave school. Already, back then, I’d thought: damn waste of time, thank God I won’t have to bother with reading and writing ever again. How would I know that I’d have to learn it all over again?
I looked out at the men working in the yard, listened to the sound of the shovels against grit, the soft rumble of the cement mixer – all of it was like the rhythm of a strange music, lulling me to sleep as I sat in front of the files. The table fan was blowing in my face and making me drowsy. Wake up. Wake up. I knew that if I truly wanted to become the person I was supposed to be, I would have to make sense of those papers in front of me.
I heard Mr Lai approaching, and pretended to be examining the files as he walked in. ‘We have to get some parts for the generator,’ I said. ‘Nothing major, just one small fitting that will help us save money in the long run.’ I don’t know how I knew that, but I did – must have picked it up in a previous job. Mr Lai hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll give you some cash.’ He was almost out of the room when he turned back and said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll buy a safe for the office. I’ll bring over a few thousand bucks to keep in it – you can look after it for the time being.’
After he left I sat at the desk and watched the men work. Their arms rising and falling, their legs planted deep in mounds of earth and sand, trousers rolled up to their knees. Rio was wearing a pair of fake Real Madrid shorts that were too big for him, tightened with a belt and hanging past his knees. He and Halim were hauling some bags of cement towards the mixer, walking swiftly with small steps, their bare feet making tracks in the earth. Their knees buckled slightly now and then, and I remembered that same sensation in my own legs just a couple of hours before – that feeling of forcing your body to do what it didn’t want to do, until it became so familiar that you no longer knew how not to force your body, and simple acts like lifting a cup of tea or a bowl of rice to your lips felt strange and lifeless. Overhead the sky was turning dark. Soon, when the afternoon rain showers arrived and turned the yard to mud, it would be more difficult to walk, and the men knew this, which is why they were pushing themselves now. Run, lift, throw. Anticipating the rain, Bayu had taken off his shirt, and I could see the dark scar on his back from his last job on a construction site in Seremban – a long curved line, the width of a finger, that looked barely healed. As he emptied a wheelbarrow full of rocks, he slipped and fell to the ground. His head hit the handle of the barrow with a dull thud, and he fell awkwardly on an outstretched hand – the kind of fall that shocks the wrist and collarb
one. Aiiiiie. His cry was like a small child’s, high-pitched and weak – it didn’t match the width of his shoulders, the stockiness of his legs. The others laughed. If I’d been out there I’d have done the same – laughed and teased him for being clumsy. He rubbed his head, dusted his arm and started running with the empty wheelbarrow, ready to collect a new load. Of course he would cry out like a child. He was not even twenty years old.
I sat in my chair and looked at my hands, turning them over a few times. The backs were much lighter in colour than the palms. I closed my eyes. All of a sudden, I was tired. I lay down and went to sleep, cooled by the table fan.
With each year I distanced myself a little more from the physical work on the farm. On a few occasions early on, when I was supervising a group of workers in the construction of a brick storehouse or a new net-cage, I’d get frustrated if I thought they were too slow, or weren’t carrying out the task correctly – I felt the urge to jump into the boat and drag the nets up from the water to untangle them, as I’d done throughout my childhood, or to spread the mortar evenly and align the bricks myself. As I stood watching the men at work, my body felt as though it was trying to escape my control. Now, as before, I had to force it, but in a different way – this time to remain still, because it was not used to being so. The more my inaction frustrated me, the louder I shouted at the workers.
Still, the body can unlearn the lessons of a lifetime, and soon the idea of taking off my shirt and working in the sun felt so foreign to me that it became distasteful. Why would I do it? I spent my time doing the rounds, making sure the fish were healthy, that the pumps and filters and generators were functioning. I also supervised all the building and repair work. The farm expanded, and after a few years we had a sales manager and a secretary.
I started saving money and having a life outside of work – the kind of evenings and weekends that I’d always imagined normal people had. I got married and bought a house. We started going out of town – an overnight drive to Penang, a five-day tour of Bangkok. Even when I took time off, I drew my salary – I got used to the idea of receiving money even though I wasn’t working. In August that year, I remember going to the bank and checking my account, and not even feeling any great pleasure in seeing that my pay had been safely deposited – 1,900 ringgit. I had no way of knowing that it would be the last time.
When I think back to that day when Hendro came running to tell me there was a phone call for me, I sometimes wonder how things might have been if the line had gone dead, which sometimes happened, because our connection wasn’t very reliable. I know it’s God’s will, and that things turned out the way they did because He intended it. But still. I sometimes imagine Hendro saying, ‘Someone called but said, “Forget it, don’t worry if Ah Hock is busy right now.”’ Instead, I remember his breathlessness as he walked briskly beside me, peeling off to rejoin the other men in our soon-to-be car park. In the office, the phone’s receiver was lying face-down on the table, away from its cradle – I didn’t know if the caller had hung up since Hendro answered it.
‘Hello?’
‘Wai, little brother! It’s me.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Heyyy … it’s Keong.’
She sits and stares at me without blinking.
I noticed right at the start, from the very first interview. She never blinks. Not even when I run out of things to say. In moments of silence she holds my gaze and smiles. It’s always me who looks away first.
I didn’t like her at the beginning, and part of me still doesn’t trust her. You can never really believe anything they say, these educated types from the big city – they’re too ready with their smile, too interested in you. She looks me in the eye when I talk, as if what I’m saying is the most important thing in the world. Every so often she nods, like she truly understands what I’m saying. Sometimes she makes a noise, like Um … umm, as if to say, Yes, I’m with you. She frowns and looks at me as if she’s absorbing every single word I say, even when I’m just talking about unimportant things – the kind of underwear I once bought in Sungai Wang Plaza, what kind of noodles I ate one evening in 2003, that kind of thing. Sometimes I do it on purpose. I want to see if she gets bored and hurries me along to talk about other stuff.
But she never loses her composure, always pretends to be fascinated. Never yawns, never checks her watch. Her Samsung Galaxy is on the table in front of me, recording everything I say, but she rarely looks at it. She just scribbles notes in her notepad from time to time. I feel like I’m a politician giving a press conference on live TV.
I’m the one who keeps glancing at the phone, just to make sure it’s still recording.
When I got her first email about two months ago, I thought it was junk, like the rest of the stuff in my inbox. Beautiful China Bride, USA Diploma Online, Viagra Direct. That day I noticed a message headed Request for interview. I ignored it – it was as meaningless to me as all the others. About a week later, I noticed another email from the same person, headed: Fw: Please indicate your response. Who actually clicks on this kind of email? Every day I read about people being scammed. You click on a link and your whole computer is infected, a hacker in Russia gets all your bank info. Someone takes your hard-earned cash. They even take your identity.
However, I am the kind of person who clicks on these links. I have no online banking, no credit card, no spouse to discover the stuff I look at on the computer – I have nothing to lose. I waited for a week, then two, reading the email a couple of times each day. Finally I thought, She’s confused me with someone else.
But there was no mistake. She had been doing research for her studies in America, and had heard about my case. Now she was returning to Malaysia to spend some time conducting field work. She wanted to interview me, to try to understand the circumstances and events surrounding the case. A fraudster, I thought immediately. Someone pretending to be someone else. I’d say yes, and ‘she’ would come into my house with ten armed men and rob me of what little cash I had left.
I would like to talk to you on an informal basis, to build a portrait of you as a human being. I am interested in your personal history. We could have an initial chat and see how things progress.
I wrote back because I was bored. She replied, with a reference letter from her university as proof. I Googled her and saw her college photo. Tan Su-Min. I asked the pastor at church to ring the number on the letter, just to be sure. New York, ah? he said. He read the letter slowly and said, doctorate in sociology – wah, no joke. It’s OK, it’s genuine, no need to call.
The first day, she rang the bell once and opened the metal gates without waiting for me to come to the door. She had crossed the small concrete porch before I could even make it out of the kitchen. I thought, She isn’t scared at all. The dog next door started barking – lots of people round here have dogs because of the break-ins. You wouldn’t think there’s anything to steal in a neighbourhood like this, but these days robbers do anything for a TV or a stereo set. The slightest thing that happens – a motorbike pulls up in front of a house at night – all the dogs start barking. But she wasn’t at all bothered by them.
She should have been apprehensive, but instead I was the one who hesitated. I stood watching her through the grille of the front door. Hair cut short, like a boy’s. Or like Faye Wong’s in about 1995. (I told her this a few weeks later, when I felt comfortable enough to make jokes with her.) The same height as me, about five foot seven, wearing shorts so long they looked like army trousers, with big pockets down the side. More cheerful than in her college photo. She took off her sunglasses and put them on the top of her head.
You’re OK with chatting in the house? she said. We could always go out and have our first conversation somewhere else if you’re more comfortable that way. Whatever you prefer. Her question felt more like a command to me.
It’s OK, we can stay here, I said.
As soon as she stepped in, she started to look around. She turned to me and tried to be polite
by making small talk – Thank you for agreeing to meet, I hope it isn’t too inconvenient, isn’t it hot, there’s been no rain recently – but her eyes didn’t focus on me, she kept gazing at things around the room, so often that I turned to see what she was checking out. But there was nothing there, just the same room I’d known all these years, the old rattan furniture that people from church donated. A Korean drama was playing on the TV. I’d forgotten to turn it off when she arrived, and the actors’ voices filled the room. Oppa, myo haeyo. On the table across the room, a pile of newspapers. Nanyang Siang Pau and Sin Chew Jit Poh. A bible. A small cookie tin that I use to put my Magnum 4D and Big Sweep tickets in. I couldn’t figure out what she was looking at.
I offered her a drink, as I do when people from church call round – a carton of Yeo’s chrysanthemum tea. Good for hot weather, I said.
She laughed and took the carton in her hand. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. She took a photo of it with her phone and studied it for a while before peeling away the little straw glued to the pack. Very high sugar content, she said.
Her first few questions were simple and dull. How long had I lived here, what was I planning to have for dinner that evening, was she interrupting my daily schedule – that sort of thing. I’d been nervous beforehand, wondering if she was going to ask me uncomfortable questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer. Maybe I wouldn’t even understand them. But all at once I felt I had nothing to fear.