We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  ‘Wait here.’ Keong got up and strolled casually around the people gathered there, smoking and chatting just as we were doing. I watched him for a while, disappearing into the crowd, emerging now and then, exchanging a greeting here and there. He’d come back and start talking about random things, like the wars in the Gulf and the Balkans, or whether McDonald’s ice cream was actually made of pork fat. And he’d ask questions like, ‘In a war between America and Russia, who would you support?’

  Just as I was laughing, this rich kid came up to us, nervous as hell, and said to Keong, ‘Don’t rip me off, OK?’ You know the type – neat hair, bright blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt, genuine for sure, not a night-market counterfeit. Silver watch, pale skin. Probably same age as me but looked about sixteen.

  ‘Heyyy, little brother, go back and relax with your friends for a while,’ Keong said. ‘I’ll let you know when it’s good. Don’t believe me? Just ask your buddies.’ He lit another cigarette once the kid had gone away. ‘First timers – pain in the ass.’ He passed me a pack of Salems, even though I was only halfway through the cigarette I was smoking. Then he gave me a fistful of cash and some instructions – told me to get into the club, leave the pack in the toilets, wait a while, and watch out for the Ralph Lauren kid. In moments like that you think, Why didn’t I just say no? It would have been so easy to treat it as a joke, as just one more no-meaning thing that Keong had come up with. I could have just stood up and walked back to my scooter and said, ‘Your mother. You’ve gone nuts. Seeya next week. Some of us have to work.’ And gone back home. But things don’t work that way – sometimes your brain doesn’t recognise danger or risk until much later – days, weeks, years – and it’s only then that the event feels scary, because the passing of time has made it seem that you had a choice. But at that moment, sitting there with Keong, options did not exist for me. It felt like the most natural thing in the world – the only one, in fact – to provide him with the answer he wanted, and grant my approval. ‘En.’ You might say that I could have bailed out at any time, but once I was inside the disco everything I did became melded together to form part of one continuous decision; every tiny action felt necessary and unavoidable – making my way to the toilets was the only way to escape the mass of people dancing with their heads shaking wildly; pretending to wash my hands was the sole means of making myself appear innocent; waiting for Ralph Lauren boy to appear was my way of assuring my friendship with Keong and being part of city life. I had placed the pack of Salems on a ledge in front of me, slightly to my right, in between two basins, so that if the police burst in I’d be able to claim ignorance, but if anyone else tried to take them I’d say they were mine. Don’t ask me how I figured that out, I just did – throw someone in the sea and they’ll find a way to swim. The more I tried not to look at the pack, the more it appeared in my field of vision, green and white, crushed along one edge. I pretended to wash my hands. Washing, washing, waiting. People came in, they went out. No one touched the cigarettes. Finally the kid walked in. I motioned with my chin towards the pack, and made to leave. He said, ‘Wait.’ We were alone. He opened the pack, took out the three cigarettes that were inside and dropped them to the damp floor, where they immediately started to soak up the dark yellow muck of piss and dirty water. He shook the pack and cupped a pink tablet in his palm. Quickly, he put it in his mouth and left without looking at me.

  Outside, Keong was still sitting on the low concrete wall, and when I joined him he said, ‘If the world was taken over by aliens, what would be your final meal?’

  ‘Fuck you. Chaohai.’

  ‘Relaaaax. Nothing bad happened to you, right? Calm down and grow up.’

  He was right. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just part of life. I’d helped out a friend from my village, nothing more. That’s how I tried to square things in my head, and sure enough, after a few days I didn’t think I’d done anything out of the ordinary that night. I’d just helped a buddy with something he had to do.

  Still, I began to drift away from Keong, and though we’d occasionally meet for late-night supper down at the stalls, our lives were pulling apart and I felt less and less desire to search him out. He was drifting through life, experimenting with things that would lead nowhere – what else could he have done, to be fair? – but I wasn’t ready for that in-between life, the fun always shadowed by fear. We’re young, he once said, Life is long. But he knew that wasn’t true, that people like us didn’t have time on our side. We weren’t like the cool Ralph Lauren boy who time favoured, we were already hustling for a living, already looked ten years older than him. For us, it was the opposite, in fact, and every day I told myself, Hurry, you don’t have much time. I was in the city, I had to learn things, see things; I had to nail down some kind of life for myself.

  One night, over noodles and beer at a dai cau place in Puchong, Keong told me he’d pack it all in one day, take off to Guangzhou, where big business was starting to happen – it would be easy for people like us because we could speak Cantonese. We start a business, marry a girl from Chaozhou and make a fortune. Doing what? I asked, but he just shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes.’

  I don’t know where he went, whether he actually made it to China as he said he would, but a couple of weeks later he was gone. I went to the DVD stalls in Low Yat, Chow Kit, all the places he’d worked at, but the answer everywhere was the same. Keong is gone, and no one knows where. I should have been worried about him – in his line of work, the people he hung around, he might have been hurt, or in jail, or chased out of town – but instead I was relieved. Happy. The kind of quiet joy that made me feel airy and weightless, like a shred of cloth swirling in the river when the tide pulls in. Because maybe he really had achieved his dreams and gone to China to find wealth and a pretty bride. But mostly because he had slipped out of my life and I wouldn’t have to see him again. I hadn’t realised it, but his presence was like the little thorny spine in the base of my foot – hardly a problem at all, barely noticeable most days, but present nonetheless, and always threatening to turn into something more painful, even if I never knew exactly what shape that pain would assume. It was that threat – that idea of something terrible that might or might not happen – that disappeared when Keong left town.

  On the surface nothing much changed in my life. I kept working, and looking for work when I wasn’t working. I never spent more than a few days without employment. No big change, some would say – still a loser’s life. But without Keong, I felt free.

  My last job in the city was at a neighbourhood restaurant called Fatty Crab, which was much more profitable than you’d think if you saw it – it was just a coffee shop on the corner of a typical block of shophouses in a housing estate, which wasn’t so rich back then, but I guess not poor either. All around that estate, new ones were being built, bigger and smarter, providing an endless supply of customers.

  A deep open drain ran by the side of the restaurant, and over the years the grease from woks and grills had turned the cement black, so it looked as if you were staring into a bottomless chasm. But that didn’t put people off, and neither did the cramped tables and half-broken plastic chairs and ceiling fans that didn’t work. Maybe it was precisely because it was a simple restaurant, modestly priced, that it was so popular. People drove across town and waited patiently for up to an hour to sample the crab and satay and chicken wings, and it was full all the time.

  The boss-lady, Ah Leng Chee, drove a Mercedes SLK. Can you imagine that, old auntie driving a German sports car? Dressed like an auntie too, old nylon trousers and plain blouses, dyed black hair thinning so much that you could see her scalp, powdered face to keep the heat at bay – you’d never know she was rich until you saw her climb into that car. Arrived from Kuantan nearly thirty years previously, and now look at her – driving a Mercedes and raking it in. She was nineteen when she moved to KL – exactly my age when I did. Maybe that was why she loved me as she did, not because she didn’t have a son, whi
ch you might have been tempted to believe was the reason, but because she saw a version of herself in me. That’s why she paid me a thousand a month to supervise the seating of the customers and keep an eye out to make sure the orders were delivered on time. It wasn’t a demanding job, so in the afternoons I helped the Nepalese workers with the heavy manual work, unloading the sacks of rice and vegetables, and late at night, stacking the dozens of tables and hundreds of chairs before sluicing down the floor. ‘Gone crazy, meh?’ she’d bark when she saw me with my trouser legs rolled up to my knees, sweeping the grime from the floor while Bhim or one of the other Nepalese aimed the hosepipe. And though she never smiled when she said it, I knew her words were meant as praise. Sometimes I’d look at her while I was carrying out this final task, late at night, watch her patiently adding up the receipts, and I’d try to imagine her arriving in the city, a young woman my age, all those years ago. But I’d never really be able to visualise it – she was always just a kind old auntie to me.

  She had a daughter who lived in San Francisco, a few years older than I was back then. She came to visit once, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with the name of her college printed on it – I can’t remember which one now. [Pause.] It was getting to the end of the lunch hour, but the restaurant was still full and noisy, with voices and laughter on top of the clatter of plates and the shouting from the kitchen beyond, with the din from the passing traffic in the street mixed into all of it. She stood behind the counter watching us rush from table to table, her mother helping us take orders and even serve the food. We were short-staffed that day, I seem to remember, though I can’t recall why. I thought she was taking it all in, as if she was enjoying a movie, and I began to worry what she thought of us, that maybe she found us shabby and dumb. Primitive. That was the word that came to my mind; she found us primitive, unsophisticated. She’d have looked at the four Nepalese, two Burmese and me, and thought, Poor things, they’re so underdeveloped. But as I walked past the counter on the way to the kitchen I noticed that she wasn’t looking at us at all – her eyes were just staring into space, even though her lips were pulled into a smile. She was sweating, wisps of hair stuck to her forehead and her temples, the ceiling fans doing nothing to relieve her discomfort. At one point I thought I’d caught her eye, so I smiled back, but she just kept gazing into the distance, her pleasant expression intended for no one. That’s when I realised she didn’t want to be there at all, that it must have been torture for her to be in that cheap restaurant. No air-con. Oily floors. Half the customers wearing soccer shorts or clothes that could have passed for pyjamas. When I saw things through her eyes I felt sorry for her, having to put up with the noise and heat and grease.

  She was missing her fiancé, Ah Leng Chee explained later, and couldn’t wait to get back to the US. ‘Her boyfriend angmoh is it?’ I asked – I don’t know why it felt important. She lived in San Francisco, it wouldn’t be surprising if she lived with a white guy. Ah Leng Chee nodded and fell silent for a long while. ‘Yes. Getting married next year.’

  ‘Not coming back to take over the business?’

  Ah Leng Chee shrugged. ‘You young people, you just do what you want.’ It turned out her daughter already had a Green Card, and was planning to live in the States forever. ‘When I moved to KL she was just a small child. Look at her now.’ She visited two, three times in the space of a week, then I never saw her again.

  One night, just as the dinner sitting was winding down and the last of the customers were at that point where they were thinking about leaving but couldn’t, because they’d eaten too much and were feeling too lethargic, and the place was quieter, less rushed, and the staff starting to relax – a couple of scooters pulled up outside. I don’t know why, but I noticed them immediately – scooters buzz up and down the road all day and night, but these were different. The deliberate drawing to a halt, one in the laneway next to the kitchens, the other right in front of the restaurant, engines killed almost at the same time. I’ve often heard it said that in such moments time expands, things happen in slow motion. People talk about being able to recall every detail, about watching dumbstruck and not being able to react because the actions they observe are out of step with time. But I can’t believe that. When you’re in the midst of violence, everything occurs swiftly. It swirls around you, envelops you, doesn’t let you go, and you react, God knows you react. And so it was that even as I saw the three men enter the restaurant, the long curved blades of their machetes raised in the air, I rushed over to Ah Leng Chee, who had just started to count up the day’s takings, the piles of cash arranged neatly on the counter.

  That was her money. [Pause.] Our money.

  And she did not remain silent as those slow-motion stories of terror would have you believe, but was already screaming as I reached her side and tried to shield her from the men. She was making a noise I didn’t think she was capable of, a high-pitched cry that repeated and repeated as I grappled with one of the men, and suddenly a couple of the Nepalese workers were with me, throwing their slender frames at the robbers. In a few seconds it was over, and as the men escaped on their bikes Ah Leng Chee ran out, as if she was going to try to catch them, shouting, ‘Damned black devils! Damned black devils!’ There was cash all over the floor. I started to gather it up – all our pay, what we needed to survive, scattered across the restaurant. As I started to collect it I noticed long streaks of blood across the chipped grey tiles and thought, She’s hurt. But Ah Leng Chee was still standing at the threshold of the restaurant shouting out into the darkness. I looked up and saw Sujan, the Nepalese cook, sitting on the floor, propped up against the counter with his hand clutching his arm. The others were standing over him, talking to him, cajoling him the way a mother would when she tried to lull a baby to sleep, only they were trying to keep him from falling unconscious, their voices low and urgent, as if their own lives depended on him staying awake. His fingers gripped his arm so tightly that I had difficulty prising them open, and when I did, I caught sight of bright white bone amid the ribbons of purple-red flesh. One of the boys handed me a clean cloth for a tourniquet, and I lashed the wound as tightly as I could.

  Ah Leng Chee was still shouting into the darkness, her voice starting to get hoarse. I noticed that my arms and clothes were covered in blood – a gash ran across my forearm. The diners were standing up, arranged in a neat semi-circle behind some tables that we’d started to stack up, like a row of spectators at a show, watching silently. ‘Can someone please take this man to hospital,’ I said. The money was still strewn across the floor. A man replied, ‘We should call the police.’ No, I said, take him to the damn hospital. Finally a young woman raised her hand and pointed to a BMW parked outside the restaurant. Five of us carried Sujan out to the car, with Bhim cradling his head and shoulders. The woman opened the door to her car and we placed him flat on the back seat. Even in the half-dark I could see the blood spreading over the pale leather upholstery and trickling into the seams, and I felt bad because the woman would have to spend a lot of money cleaning it all up. As I climbed into the passenger seat my arm began to sting, a sharp pain pushing through the numbness that had been there before, yet all I could think of was that the blood was going to drip onto the car seat, and I tried to think of ways to get rid of the stains, maybe rub salt and vinegar into them. I worried about that a lot on the way to the hospital.

  Next day, Ah Leng Chee sacked the Bangladeshi guy who worked as a kitchen porter. Just like that. She was convinced that he’d tipped off his friends and told them about the cash she counted out every night. ‘They weren’t foreign, they were locals,’ I said.

  ‘You saw their identity cards, meh?’ she asked. ‘Anyway, these guys – they’re all the same.’

  [Pause. Rolls up sleeve to display a scar.]

  I don’t know how I didn’t feel it when they slashed me, but the cut was clean and deep, and took a while to heal. [Traces finger along the diagonal mark, about four inches long; other smaller scars also visible.] I
guess you could say that it left me with some memories of that evening. [Laughs.]

  About six months after that, I arrived at work and saw that Ah Leng Chee was already there, which was unusual – I was normally the one who opened up the restaurant each morning, just before ten, and closed up around midnight. She trusted me with tasks like that, she knew I’d keep things safe. That day there was a lot of dust in the air – not the usual haze that floated over the city, but thicker clouds of it coming from the construction sites nearby, where those patches of sparse city jungle were being cleared to build a new housing estate. Ah Leng Chee was wearing a surgical mask that covered her mouth and nose, which in those days was a rare sight. Now even fashionable people wear them, but back then it was something that only people in Japan and Taiwan knew about, and I used to laugh at it. ‘You think you’re a Japanese scientist?’ I used to joke, but that day I have to admit that I wished I had one too. She lowered her mask and said, ‘Ah Hock, you can’t work here any more.’ Business hadn’t been good, she hadn’t been making much money for some time. She had taken out a loan, and now she was struggling to make the repayments. She had decided to get rid of me and three other workers, the ones who earned the most; the ones who remained would just have to manage a bigger workload. She wasn’t going to lie: if business picked up again she’d employ another foreigner rather than rehire me – they were so much cheaper. ‘So, you can’t work here any more.’ She pulled the mask back up over her nose and mouth and returned to her calculator and the pile of receipts.