by Tash Aw
She stares at the plate as if she’s trying to work out what’s on it, even though it’s obvious.
It’s chee cheong fun, I say. Early lunch.
I know.
Have some. I bought enough for both of us.
No, it’s fine, I’m not hungry.
Hei, don’t be so polite. Have some. It’s from Long Kei, you know, just down the road in Taman Eng Ann. The best in town. I went specially.
Really, that’s kind of you, but I’m not hungry.
You need to eat! You’re too skinny.
I start to dish out a portion for her, and she slowly sits down in front of it. She looks sad as she stares at the plate.
I promise you, it’s delicious. They make their tau pan jeong fresh every day.
It’s not that.
What’s the problem then?
I don’t eat carbohydrates. Well, not at the moment, anyway.
Carbohydrates?
Yeah. Noodles, bread, potatoes, rice, anything like that.
Not even rice?
No.
My God. Not a good idea! That’s why you’re so thin.
It’s fine, it’s not a big deal. I can eat some with you.
The way she says it makes me feel bad for insisting. Maybe it’s a religious ritual that I don’t know about, a Buddhist tradition. She cuts off a piece the size of her fingernail and puts it in her mouth. I wait nervously.
Mmm. It’s good.
I told you! Ha, eat – eat some more.
Wait, she says. Is there meat in the sauce?
Don’t think so.
Shit, I think. She’s a Buddhist.
You know what, I really appreciate this, but I had a really big breakfast before I came.
No rice or noodles or bread – how can you have had a big breakfast?
Why don’t you take your time and finish your chee cheong fun? I’ll sit and look over my notes, and when you’re ready, you just let me know and we can begin the interview for today.
OK.
I try and take my time eating, enjoying every morsel of the noodles as I usually do. But even though I don’t look at her, I can see her out of the corner of my eye, sitting in the rattan armchair, looking through pieces of paper in her folder. She isn’t doing anything in particular. She doesn’t look at me or try to talk to me, she just looks at her notes, turning the pages over, rearranging them. I try to ignore her and concentrate on my food, but it’s impossible. I eat quickly, then take my usual seat opposite her.
She looks up and smiles. Shall we begin?
October 15th
Bottled-gas delivery man.
Waiter, several times.
Night security guard.
Strange. I’m trying to remember all the jobs I did in two and a half years, but it’s hard – I can’t answer your question fully. I know I’m forgetting one or two.
For the first ten days after I moved to KL, I slept on the floor of Keong’s room in Puchong. In spite of his boasts on the phone, I knew that his life in the city wasn’t going to be as glorious as he’d made it out to be – that the life of kids like us, who’d dropped out of school at sixteen, seventeen, would surely have its limitations. All I hoped for was that these limits would be higher than the ones in the village, or at the very least, different.
Life in the city didn’t seem to have provided Keong with the fulfilment he’d craved during his brief years in the village. He rented a room in a small apartment owned by a thin old Cantonese woman who rented her two bedrooms to young people like us, new to the city and looking for work. She herself slept on the rattan sofa in the living room, in front of the TV that was never turned off in the ten days I stayed there. Two in the morning, it was on; 8.30 in the morning, it was on; four in the afternoon – every time I walked through the door, it was on. Often, she’d be asleep, sitting half-upright in a chair, but the TV would be on. She had no family, no phone, no one to keep her company – all she looked forward to was collecting the two hundred ringgit from her tenants at the start of each month, which she kept in a biscuit tin under the sofa.
‘Dangerous thing for a granny to do,’ Keong joked with her. ‘Someone could just walk in, beat you to death and take all your money.’
He had been there for ten months, the longest he’d stayed anywhere since he moved back to KL a few years before. It was because of the view, he said – from his window on the tenth floor he could see the city spreading out before him, obscured by two other blocks of flats but present nonetheless, twenty-four-seven, reminding him of all the glorious possibilities available to him. The blinking of the lights in the evening, the smog in the daytime, drifting across the seas from Indonesia and settling over the skyline. That year the gigantic Twin Towers had just been completed, and the glow they threw up at night meant that you could see the dust particles suspended in the air, shifting constantly. Even when nothing moved, the city was changing all the time. That’s how he felt. Only problem was, he was stuck in that bedroom, often sleeping until lunchtime despite the light forcing its way through the thin curtains. Why get up early when you don’t have a steady job?
A couple of months after he moved back, he’d tried to educate himself – saved a bit of money and enrolled in evening courses in computers and typing, and another one in feng shui and astrology. Everyone knew that the future was in technology. If you could use a computer you could become a millionaire in three months by investing in stocks and shares, which was just another form of gambling, after all – and God knows he was a demon when it came to gambling. All you needed to do was to reduce the variables of fortune – and that’s where feng shui came in. You simply harnessed the powers of the universe, and once you were in harmony with the elements, there was no limit to what you could achieve. The internet had just arrived in the country, and shops started to appear all over town where you could go and find the news and other information on computers. That was only twenty years ago – just yesterday, it feels like. But it was a pain to go to the computer store every day, and when he did make it there, the internet connection often didn’t work, and he would spend hours trying to perform the simplest tasks. He should have given up right from the start and realised that the sort of career he’d imagined for himself was reserved for people who worked in offices, who’d finished their diplomas at the age of twenty-one, twenty-two, who knew how to speak foreign languages – people like you.
During the brief period I lived with him, he rarely stirred before I’d come back from a morning’s search for work. We’d sit and share some kuih that I’d bought from the street hawker outside our block, and Keong would smoke three cigarettes in a row on the narrow balcony. He asked a lot of questions about the village, wanted to hear the latest about various kids our age, whether they were still in Kuala Selangor; how my mother was; whether the fishing had been good; whether Uncle Kam’s papayas were still as tasty as ever – the most mundane things you could think of. ‘You’re joking, meh?’ I said. I never knew that he’d even noticed anyone else apart from me in the village. He’d always seemed so detached, deliberately distant, but now he was interested in the news of specific people. I have no idea why these individuals mattered more than the others, why they’d left an impression on him, but he seemed happy nonetheless to hear that Little Hong had started a small business making dumplings and bao down the road, or that Fei-fei was now married and living in Klang, with a young child and another on its way. Maybe Keong had had a crush on her, who knows. I can’t remember him ever having met her. He didn’t take his eyes off me when I told him about the village, drinking in everything I said and forgetting to smoke his cigarette. I watched it burn steadily down as I talked, big clumps of ash falling to the ground. Beats me why he found any of it interesting.
Sometimes I suspected that he went back to bed after I left to spend the afternoon looking for a job. When I got back in the evening – eight, nine o’clock – he would be preparing to go out, looking after the evening shift at his friend’s CD stall in Cho
w Kit, which I understood was code for something else. Later, after I’d moved out and was struggling a bit in between jobs, he would make a few attempts at getting me involved in his line of work – a low-level dealing in pills and powder and cash – but I could never tell the difference between fengtau and Ice and G and K, and was always worried I’d make a mistake. He thought he was doing me a favour. ‘Guys like us, it’s the only way we can make a bit of money quickly.’ But I could see that his heart wasn’t in it, and he never tried very hard to convince me. He mentioned how much money he made from it, and I realised why it was dangerous – not because the drugs could kill you, or get you killed by rival gangsters or the police, or land you in jail for twenty years, but because the money was just enough to keep you going for a while without a proper job, but never – never, never, never – enough to make you feel comfortable and safe. One weekend he would earn a wad of cash big enough to last two months, other times he’d go weeks without making anything, or would have to pay his share of protection money, or subscriptions, or whatever he called it, to someone bigger and meaner, or pay a bribe to the police or the city enforcement officers who came snooping round his CD stall – always, always bribes. That one payment would dry you out for a month while you waited for your next windfall. And so on.
Once, towards the end of my time in KL, he talked about helping out a friend in a new line of business: girls. ‘Helping out?’ I said. ‘I don’t even want to know what that means.’ He smiled and said, ‘You’re still as big a dickhead as ever.’ When he laughed I could sense that what he was telling me was not a boast but a confession, a strange silent plea for help, though God only knows what I could have done. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t want him messing with prostitutes. That kind of stuff was serious. I’d had over two years in the city by then; I knew when things were getting out of hand for him. I guess he wanted me to persuade him not to do it. He imagined us getting into an argument and insulting me for being a coward, and later, when he’d jacked it all in, he’d say he had only done it for me. I was the reason he’d turned down a perfectly lucrative job. But I just said nothing – what could I have said that would have made sense? Go get yourself proper employment? He was just doing what he had to do.
Those first ten days, sleeping on the floor of his tiny room, I didn’t realise that he had already become stuck in a place he didn’t want to be. I know now that he must have been taking drugs from time to time. That’s why he had such strange sleeping patterns, why one time he didn’t come home all night, and the next day was full of energy despite the circles under his eyes that were so dark I thought someone had punched him. Those were things that only dawned on me later, when I’d had time to figure out for myself the way the city shaped you without you even knowing what was happening to you. But right then, all I thought was, Why is Keong so miserable?
I felt the complete opposite – the entire city was at my feet, I couldn’t wait to get going. I found a job as a waiter at a Chinese seafood restaurant in Old Klang Road. That was my first, and also the best, though maybe I felt that way because it was the first, and I hadn’t had time to realise that it was actually pretty lousy. After just a week of ferrying the orders from the kitchen to the tables and waiting until someone more senior came and served the dishes, I was given a promotion of sorts and allowed to lift the dishes from the trays and place them with a flourish on the tables before the hungry diners, while someone else stood holding the tray. Such a fine distinction, invisible to the customers – I mean, do you ever notice who puts the food on the table, or who’s standing like a dumb statue with the tray in their hands? – but to me it felt like a huge step up in the world.
Right away, I was better than that someone else – the sullen, silent person holding the tray – who was always foreign. Mostly Myanmar, Nepalese, sometimes Cambodian. They’d stand there looking at me, waiting for me to give them instructions. I’d only been there a week, ten days, but already I wielded power over them, mysteriously and without me even asking, by virtue of being the same colour and race as the forty-something-year-old couple who owned the place. I could feel it in the way these migrants looked at me, and in the way I returned their fragile smiling gazes. We both knew that one word from me accusing them of laziness or insolence and they’d be in trouble. Between their word and mine, there would be no argument. Luckily, there was no reason at that restaurant to invent a story about a foreign employee drinking on the job, or groping a Chinese waitress’s ass, or being rude to a client, or some other exaggeration following an argument or a dispute over small amounts of money – mild fabrications just to get the guy sacked. Later, there would be – but not at that place.
Can you blame me for feeling happy? Suddenly, I had an income – I was making a living in the city! – and at work I felt that strange sense of authority over others. For years you think no one cares about you, then all at once, in your first job, you find that there are people out there who are terrified of you. It changes the way you feel about yourself, doesn’t it? The shifts were long. Twelve, thirteen hours, with a brief lull in the afternoon when the last of the stragglers from lunch had gone and the tables had been cleared, the kitchen cleaned and re-stocked for the onslaught of dinner in just over an hour’s time. Most of us took a quick nap, seated near the entrance, under the ceiling fan, resting our heads on the table in front of us with our folded arms as a pillow. Sometimes, when I didn’t have time for a break I’d watch the others sleeping and think that they looked like birds at rest, curled into themselves and oblivious to the world for those few minutes.
I got paid eight hundred ringgit a month, which seemed a lot to me, and I could afford to rent a small room in a flat not far from Keong’s.
I left the seafood restaurant after about six months because I was bored and wanted more – more money, yes, but also more of everything else. More variety, more fun, more work, even. I didn’t know that all the jobs I’d get would end up giving me the same sensation I had towards the end of my time at that first seafood restaurant (there would be others) – a mixture of boredom and fatigue caused not so much by the constant movement of my body over twelve hours, but by the sense of a whole universe of ease and satisfaction existing just beyond the horizons of the world I was living in. All I had to do was push beyond a silky-thin membrane and I’d be there, part of a world where comfort produced greater comfort, day after day for years without end. The thought that all that was almost within my grasp made whatever job I was working at meaningless – all that mattered was what came next.
My next two jobs were also in restaurants. Neither lasted long. They were smarter establishments than the first, and I thought I was moving up in the world. Air-con and black-and-white uniforms, and carpets in the second place. Keong laughed when I told him I was quitting again. ‘Restaurant jobs are for girls,’ he said. ‘Young guys like us, we don’t mess about taking orders from people. Brother, you got to give the orders, not take them.’
I worked in a tyre-repair shop and got what you might call a bit of training, but I never got used to the constant hiss of air valves and pumps and the stench of hot rubber. The guys who worked at the garage said I was good with my hands, they could see I was strong, but how long can you stay in a job like that? The oldest guy who worked there was in his seventies, Hainanese uncle with bald head and long white eyebrows. Sometimes he’d just disappear without a word, and we’d find him slumped deep in the plastic-wire armchair, fast asleep with his mouth open and spit dribbling down his chin. The trembling of his brow was the only sign he was still alive. The other guys laughed. Old Boon, wake up! They’d shout his name and sing songs, knowing that he wouldn’t even stir. He’d need to sleep for at least half an hour, sometimes more, before being able to start work again, but when he did he was swift and sharp with the tools. And then, suddenly, bang – KO’d again. When I looked at him I thought, I will light twenty million joss-sticks at the temple and pray to every god in the heavens, go to Chiengmai to worship magical mon
ks, anything to avoid a fate like that.
On my nights off I realised I was starting to avoid Keong. At the beginning I’d seek him out whenever I had some spare time, and we’d go down to the stalls and eat Hokkien mee with the beer we’d bought from the 7-Eleven, or else we’d take a ride out somewhere on our scooters looking for a cheap fengtau club that Keong had heard of, where he might be able to do a bit of business. He was slowly giving up on regular work, and had a lot of free time on his hands. I knew that he was dealing more and more in pills. (He changed lodgings often, and one time I arrived at his place while he was searching for a lost fifty-ringgit note. All the drawers were open and I saw his stock of pills, one or two each in neat little plastic bags, every colour you could think of.)
We turned up at this nightclub once, called W- disco. Of course I can’t tell you the real name – for all I know it might still be there and the police might go and raid it, and then the owners will send some gangsters to chop me up. I thought Keong had taken me there to introduce me to nightlife in the capital, but we just hung around outside, smoking and chatting. ‘You waiting for someone to turn up?’ I asked after a while. Keong laughed and replied, ‘Maybe.’ I didn’t think anything more of it – Keong had never behaved in what you might call a conventional way, even when we were in the village. I didn’t mind either, I felt comfortable there, sitting on a low cement barrier in the car park, smoking and watching the people go past – mostly young men and women who looked like us, spoke like us, but a few rich kids too, climbing out of their Toyotas, and a sprinkling of Malay guys in skinny jeans and death metal T-shirts. Even outside, the music from the club was loud enough that we had to raise our voices when we spoke, and I remember thinking, I’m a hell of a long way from Bagan Sungai Yu. I wondered what was going on in the village at that precise moment, 11.30 on a Tuesday night, the sea flattening out into the darkness, the last light in the village long since switched off, with only the street lamps to indicate the presence of human existence. Nothing, probably. I thought of my friends, the ones who hadn’t left, asleep since 8 p.m., getting ready to wake up in the pre-dawn hours to supervise the boats, the incoming catch, the trip to the wholesalers. I smiled. Fuck, what those guys would say if they saw me now.