by Tash Aw
Chinese kid with a load of cash in his bag – no further explanation needed. Samseng. They slap him round the head.
Still, he is proud, unrepentant. At the police station he sits in a cell waiting for his brothers to turn up, maybe even the legendary ultimate big boss, who he knows by reputation but has never met, the one people say is best friends with the inspector general of police. After he’s been there a day, then two, he realises that he’s been forgotten. Even the police who patrol the cells seem barely to notice his presence. They give him water and rice with sambal – no egg or chicken or anything – that he eats quickly because he’s so hungry, but it makes him sick, gives him terrible diarrhoea that lasts for a whole day, so when they finally let him out it’s obvious that it’s only because he was stinking up his cell too much. Even the two Indonesians in the lock-up were complaining about how disgusting it smelled.
In the end it wasn’t his brush with the police that ended his brief career as a gangster, it was his mother. He’d thought she’d be happy with the money he gave her from time to time, that even if she suspected what he was doing to earn it, she’d turn a blind eye because they needed it so much. Now she could pay the electricity bill. Now she could buy some herbs to make chicken soup to give herself strength for work. Twice he’d bought her a blouse from Petaling Street because he wanted her to have new clothes to wear to work, but she made a point of never putting them on – and it hurt him to see how these gifts disgusted her. He’d thought she would be happy, but she just accepted whatever money he gave her without expressing gratitude. She looked away each time he handed it to her, the notes folded up so she couldn’t see exactly how much it was. ‘Being a part-time waiter pays well these days,’ was all she said. And then, one Sunday when they were both at home watching TV, she said, ‘I had a craving for noodles yesterday after work, so I went to Wanchai Noodle House. Asked if you were working there that day.’
Keong waited for her to say, ‘They told me they didn’t know anyone by that name.’ Waited for the embarrassment and guilt and anger, wondered for a second how he should react, whether to be confrontational, scream at her, smash the furniture, set something on fire – anything to deal with the pain. But she said nothing more, just continued watching TV silently.
Two weeks later they were down here, living in our village.
What a shithole.
His mother had found a job in a factory processing fish – gutting and scaling them and packaging them for delivery to supermarkets. My mother had once worked in that factory too. It was new, it wasn’t so bad. Her hours were long but regular, her salary small but regular. She’d been born in the area, spent her whole life until the age of twenty-two in Tanjung Karang, just up the coast. A relative had told her about a house that had become vacant in Bagan Sungai Yu, two bedrooms, a big front room, a kitchen – just right for a woman, not young, not old, and her son, no longer a child but years away from becoming a man. It was a bit out of the way, but she didn’t mind, she had a scooter and Keong could cycle into town if he needed to. There were bridges across the river now, it wasn’t so hard to get around. She didn’t know what they’d do, she didn’t have a plan – she just knew she had to move back to these parts and stay for as long as she could.
She still had family up the road, an aunt and an uncle, two cousins, and that seemed plenty. She could call them and get together for dinner once in a while – it wasn’t a fancy life, but it felt as if it would never change much, in fact hadn’t changed much since she’d left two decades before. What she’d hated back then, she now loved: the sense of continuity, of surrendering to something stronger than her – the pulling in of her horizons, the comfort to be found in the death of ambition. She had forgotten what it was that she’d wanted to accomplish when she’d left home for the city, but whatever that dream was, it had caused too much anxiety and pushed her towards bad decisions. Now it was gone, she could start to live again. Years later, I would recognise the same feeling, and I would think of her, this round-faced woman who said little but smiled a lot, her cheeks pulled into small dimples. Auntie Chai. She always asked me to come round for some biscuits and a cold drink whenever our paths crossed, but somehow it rarely happened, even in a village as small as ours.
Only problem for her was Keong. Almost seventeen, bored out of his mind, he despised every minute of his life here, resented being dragged away from KL, where he had felt strong and grown-up. He hated the way his mother had tricked him into moving here – she’d told him that they were visiting relatives for Cheng Beng, that they’d only be gone a week, long enough to tidy the graves and say hello to a couple of distant cousins. They had to pack everything because she was giving up the lease of their apartment in KL, but would be getting a new one when they came back. How could he have been so dumb? He should have just insisted on staying put when he found out – he could easily have made his own way in life. But what else, really, could he do? A mother is a mother. If he’d stayed in KL, chances are he’d never have seen his mother again.
The eighteen months he lived in the village were the longest of his life. ‘If I’m still here when I’m twenty, I’ll kill myself. Swear to Buddha, Goddess of Mercy, every damn deity you can think of. I’ll do it.’
The other kids in the village stayed away from him. When he passed them in the road he just looked straight ahead, didn’t stop to say hello. They didn’t like outsiders, and he could tell that they weren’t going to accept him as one of them – which was just fine, because he didn’t have anything to say to them either. ‘Me and you – you guys, I mean, all of you – we got nothing in common. I don’t know anything about digging prawns from the mud,’ he told me.
‘But prawns don’t live in the mud.’
‘Then why are you sea gypsies always picking through the mud as if it’s the most interesting thing in your life?’
Up to then, I’d never questioned our relationship with the mudflats – our whole life by the sea – but all of a sudden this image of us crouching anxiously in the sticky grey muck seemed ridiculous. Why would anyone want to spend their days sifting through the mud for shellfish that sell for a few bucks per kilo?
‘I don’t even like the sight of you,’ he once said, laughing. ‘Don’t you guys have anything to wear other than rags?’ He continued to wear his city clothes, real shirts with long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, but his copper highlights had faded, and his hair was now just as black as everyone else’s, distinguished only by the long locks that fell over his forehead – a style that the other boys secretly made fun of. He sneered at us, we laughed at him. Sometimes, when I remember how he looked and spoke in court when testifying at my trial – how different he had become from me – I think back to his early days in the village, and realise that I should have known there would always be an unbridgeable distance between us. We both should have known that. But at that age, how could we?
It was only at games – on the small dirt patch that passed for a soccer pitch, and the basketball court that the temple had donated to the village – that the other kids had any real contact with him. Keong watched from the sidelines for a couple of weeks, smoking and pretending not to be interested. Then one day, during one of our daily late-afternoon games, just casually shooting hoops without really meaning to play – we were tired from school and from working with the nets and the cockles – the ball rolled out of play, directly into Keong’s hands. He took a shot, a long graceful arc of the arms, surprising for a kid as skinny as him. He missed, but then, as if to atone for his mistake, stubbed out his cigarette and jogged towards us, waving his hands to receive the ball.
During that first match, and every subsequent one, Keong’s entry was a sign that things were about to turn rough. He hustled for every ball, elbows jabbing, bumping into you just to let you know he was there. It wasn’t the way we usually played, and when he wasn’t there we were as lethargic and half-hearted as ever. Keong made us forget the heat and the fatigue – he made us want to fight. He put
his hands in our faces, scratching our arms, inviting a punch-up, which he duly got. Once, a boy older and taller than him squared up to him, and when Keong spat at him, the boy threw a punch that floored Keong, to the laughter of the others. The next day at soccer, the same boy slid into a tackle, bringing Keong down face-first into the dirt. This time Keong was prepared. He had a rock in his pocket, which he held tightly in his fist as he swung at the boy’s head. It was the dry season, and the blood marked the earth for many days afterwards.
On other occasions, the smallest insult would ensure that Keong stopped dead in his tracks. He’d stand still and walk towards whoever had offended him, fists clenched. It could be anything, whispered words that didn’t mean a thing – lia ma, cheebye, really, just meaningless expressions – but Keong would always react in the same way, throwing the first punch, launching himself with the full force of his scrawny body at whoever had muttered the passing vulgarity. I’m not sure why they continued to insult him. He lived in a house at the farthest end of the village, and didn’t go to school, so they had little contact with him. Maybe it was simply that he wasn’t one of us. Or maybe that without knowing it, we were bored by the regularity of our lives – scared by the way our fate was determined by the weather and the tides, the way the slightest change in the moon’s position could mean that we would have little to eat for the next month. With Keong, the equation was so much simpler. Call him a bad name and he’d react in exactly the same way every time. I never understood why he kept turning up at our games, when he knew it would always end in a fight. I guess he needed to do that to remind himself that he would never belong in our village – that he was hated there, and had a good reason to get the hell out of the place.
That I became his only friend in the village was not a surprise. He never expressed any gratitude for my silence over his beating up of the boy, but I knew he was thankful that I hadn’t caused any further trouble for him. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t because I cared about his welfare that I didn’t snitch on him, it was just because I didn’t want to get involved in anything messy. I was always like that, even as a kid. But somehow, at that age, explanations don’t come easily, and don’t seem necessary either, so the episode became anchored in the depths of our shared history, never talked about, but never forgotten either. It was the same in the days and weeks following the killing, when I was waiting for the police, for someone, anyone, to discover what I’d done. I didn’t know when or how it would happen. I was scared of life’s sudden uncertainty, but I was sure of one thing: that Keong would not tell anyone about the incident. If no one else found out, that terrible act would be silently swallowed up by our past.
He and his mother were my closest neighbours – the first people I saw when I cycled into the village. At that point we were living in our own house about a mile away from the village proper, and at night I could just about make out the lights of their house from across the fields. Physically separated from the rest of the village, it was easier for us to strike up a friendship that went unnoticed by the others, who found Keong’s urban manners unnatural and ridiculous – his cowboy swagger, arms and shoulders swaying, his constant chatter, always comparing things in the village unfavourably to what he had experienced before. I knew he was an idiot too, but I couldn’t resist his stories of life in the city, even though I suspected that they were exaggerated, and maybe plain untrue. Being with Keong and listening to his tales of fights in alleyways behind shopping malls, or making so much money you couldn’t fit it all into your pockets, was like watching a movie that enveloped me completely, that made me feel I could be part of the action if I wanted to, even when I knew it was made up. Just reach out and I could touch that world. Just hop on a bus and I could be living in it. The more I lapped up his accounts of his life, the more he talked, spinning ever more outrageous tales. Your mother, of course it’s all true! He needed me to be his audience even more than I needed to be entertained by him – without me, his memories of the city would have shrivelled and dried in the salt and sun of our coastal village. We all have our own way of surviving, and telling stories was his.
He got work up the coast as a waiter in a seafood restaurant in Sekinchan, one of those big noisy places perched on stilts that rise up over the mudflats, popular with day-trippers from the city. He didn’t like taking orders from everyone, being shouted at by the boss and the customers, but he put up with it for a time because he liked seeing the people from KL, who reminded him of his life back there – his real life, not the temporary hell that he was enduring. He chatted to them as he cleared away the dishes, found that he carried himself differently; and he realised, shockingly, that in just a few months he’d started to shuffle lazily like a village boy, instead of swaggering like he used to. How could he have changed so much in such a short time? ‘Hey, what’s up?’ he’d say as he approached a table of tourists from KL to take their order. He could see in the way their eyes widened slightly before they broke into a smile that they were surprised to find someone like him at a restaurant like that, way out in the country. In the briskness of his voice and the sharpness of his speech they saw him as one of them, and in their recognition of him, he finally understood himself.
Best of all were the girls. That’s really why he stayed in the job – the discreet eye contact, the smiles, the fact that he knew – he knew! – that they found him cool, these sophisticated women from the suburbs of the capital. One time an entire table of young women arrived for lunch on a Sunday, eight of them, without a single guy in sight, can you imagine that? What a chance for Keong. He was all over them, buzzing round the table like a wasp, never settling for long – taking their orders, bringing them a glass of warm boiled water even when they didn’t ask for it, offering them extra dishes of groundnuts behind the boss’s back, slipping in a casual compliment here and there, like, ‘Wah, nice handbag,’ and even encouraging them when they ordered Tiger beer and started to get a bit noisy. ‘No need to be so traditional hor. Women should have an independent life, not just with their husbands all the time!’ He knew what city folk liked to hear – the kind of expressions I would never really be able to use convincingly, no matter how I tried – and loved communicating with them. At last he could speak to people who understood him, instead of these country idiots with their lazy tongues and plodding minds. Sometimes, as with that group of women, he would strike up such a bond with the customers that they’d start calling him by his name whenever they wanted anything, and for those few hours he’d feel as though he had friends.
He wrote his name on a restaurant card and gave it to one of the women who had smiled at him in a way that suggested she had appreciated more than just his hard work that day. He was sure of it! ‘Anytime you come back, just ask for me and I’ll get you a nice table, right on the water’s edge.’ She gave him her business card, said she was always looking for new employees, though she never said what her business was. He kept the card for months, waiting for the right moment to call, but when he finally did, the number was dead. I was with him when he rang from the phone booth outside the post office in Kuala Selangor town. Three, four times at least, before he gave up. ‘Ah Hock, you try,’ he said, handing me the receiver. I put a coin in the phone and carefully dialled the number. The funny thing was that I didn’t hear any message saying that the number was out of use, or even a flat continuous tone, like the one in movies when someone dies in hospital – when you know for sure that there is no more hope. There was just a silence, an emptiness so vast it could have stretched forever.
As I stood there with the receiver pressed tightly to my ear, I watched Keong sitting on the stone kerb, absently plucking the long grass that was growing next to him, throwing it into the air. He seemed to have shrunk in the eighteen months he’d spent in the village – or maybe it was just that I’d got bigger. There were rain clouds out at sea that were threatening to blow inland, and a sudden breeze troubled the tops of the trees. I got tired of waiting and hung up, but as we cycled home
the silence on the phone seemed to be replaced by an even greater void. Neither of us spoke. Maybe it was the approaching storm, which made the air feel sticky, too heavy to breathe – and this in turn made time stretch out before us, endless and frightening.
Not long afterwards, Keong left the village and headed back to KL. I thought I’d never see him again, but a few years later I felt the same urge to leave that others before me had experienced – the restlessness that affects boys and girls alike when they reach a certain age and can’t stop thinking about being somewhere else. It was like an ailment, a virus that I always thought I would be immune to, but there I was, just like everyone else, desperate to escape. I went to Keong’s mother’s house and got his number. When I went to the phone booth to call him, he answered after just a few seconds.
This was in 1996 – the last months of my teenage years.