We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  ‘Remember the floods last year?’ Jezmine said, almost excitedly – exactly the way she might have done if she’d been sitting in McDonald’s and chatting with her friends over a milkshake. ‘We were the only farm in the entire state of Selangor not to be affected!’ She started to provide information on our business the way the clever students recited poetry during competitions at school, without consulting any notes, pausing at the right moment, the rise and fall of her voice as steady as a stream of music – but instead of feeling stupid as I might have done at school, I felt relief, even gratitude. I sat smiling while she spoke, nodding when she employed terms like ‘year-on-year profit’, even though I didn’t understand what they meant. I knew she was doing enough to secure the business that the farm needed. ‘And all that is because Mr Lee here insisted we made our fish cages bigger and deeper than industry standards, and installed an expensive filtration system to ensure the highest-quality products.’

  I blushed. It was true, though – I had done that.

  Jenny looked at me and smiled for the first time in the meeting. Turning to Jezmine, she said, ‘I guess men have their uses after all.’

  I can’t remember how we ended up going on our first date – we never experienced a big turning point, no moment of rupture between our professional relationship and a personal one. That moment in Korean dramas where colleagues realise that, Yes! They are actually in love, or even just, Hey, something is happening here – we didn’t experience that. Instead we simply progressed from one meeting to another, until it turned out that we were a couple. Much later, in the middle stages of our marriage, when we finally felt comfortable in our married skins, she would tease me for my lack of romance. ‘You never courted me,’ she’d say, and I’d reply, ‘I wanted to let you court me.’ In a sense, the gradual evolution of our beginning – so slow that neither of us recognised it as the start of something – would set the tone for our marriage. Things crept up on us, stealthily, and were almost over by the time we could even put a name to what we were experiencing – we could neither savour what was beautiful nor remedy what was bitter, we merely clutched at the final impressions of whatever it was we’d experienced and thought, It’s finished. Tenderness, anger, regret – we didn’t recognise them until it was too late.

  After that initial meeting, Mr Lai had been so pleased with the signing of the new contract that he put me in charge of managing affairs with Jenny’s company. I told him that it shouldn’t be me, that Jezmine was better with numbers and at talking to customers, but he insisted that I deal with them. ‘That pretty accounts manager, she prefers to deal with a man.’

  Jenny and I got used to seeing each other from time to time, and one day she texted me to say that her office was under renovation, and could I meet at the bak kut teh place across the road instead, but when I got there I found the noise from the traffic was as bad as any construction site, and we had to struggle to make ourselves heard over the scooters and buses passing by outside, the chatter of the breakfast crowd. I tried to tell her about developments on the farm – Jezmine had prepared a few sheets of figures to show how well we were doing – but Jenny kept shaking her head, asking me to repeat myself, and when our bowls of soup arrived we both felt grateful for the excuse not to talk. We ate with our heads bowed, concentrating on the food – I ate mine slowly, taking great care not to slurp it too noisily as I normally did. We went some time without speaking, and finally she said, ‘It’s like we’re on a date. Ever notice how people on a first date seldom talk? They’re too awkward to express any emotion.’

  I blushed. And although I’d been trying hard to remember my table manners, I found myself lifting my bowl to my mouth and gulping down the remainder of the soup and savouring the thick sediment at the bottom, the best part. ‘Wah, you eat so quickly,’ she said. I noticed that her meal was only half-finished. ‘I guess it’s habit, working on a farm like you do.’

  I nodded. I didn’t want to explain that in fact the habit came from childhood – I’d always eaten quickly, even as a kid.

  After that we started meeting more regularly, always for dinner at the end of a day’s work, when I’d ride into town on the new Yamaha I’d bought. We’d go to places she knew – simple spots tucked away in Pandamaran, Bukit Tinggi, even in areas you wouldn’t expect to find decent eating places, like Taman Sentosa or Teluk Kapas. At first I was worried she’d mind being on a motorbike instead of in a car – a girl like her who worked in an air-conditioned office – but she never complained, and I was grateful for that, until the day I arrived at her office to collect her and she showed me a bag of shopping from Jusco mall. She’d bought some clothes for me – a fresh white shirt and light-coloured slacks that she’d washed and pressed, as well as some black leather shoes. ‘You want me to treat you to somewhere fancy tonight, is that it?’ I joked as I got changed in the men’s restroom.

  She just smiled and said, ‘I should have bought you some new underpants too.’

  She insisted on leaving the bike and taking a taxi, even though it was only a short distance to the restaurant, a Nyonya place in Taman Bayu Perdana that was a bit fancier than the coffee shops and street stalls and open-air dai cau joints we’d usually go to – but still not what you’d call a luxury restaurant, and I couldn’t understand why she’d made such a big deal about taking me there. We were seated at a quiet table close to the counter, and after a few minutes the owner himself emerged from the kitchen – a well-preserved man in his late sixties, I’d guess, shirt tucked into his trousers, a small shiny gold buckle on his belt. His hair was thick and black, combed to one side and slick with Brylcreem. I remember thinking: His hair is younger than his face. He stopped and stared at us for a while before smiling.

  ‘Pa,’ Jenny said, ‘this is Hock Lye. The one I’ve told you about.’

  I stood up and shook his hand.

  ‘Hock Lye. You’re Hokkien too? That’s good.’

  As I exchanged pleasantries with Jenny’s father, I realised that the previous three months had in fact been our period of courtship – that beautiful time when young men are supposed to romance their prospective partners and future wives – yet I had done nothing of the sort. Instead I’d just drifted through our meetings without making any effort to impress her at all. Now, in a matter of minutes, we had become boyfriend–girlfriend, and it was down to her.

  Mr Teoh sat down with us and chatted while we waited for our food. He’d opened the restaurant about six or seven years before, one last big venture before he retired. He’d started out as a Hokkien mee seller in the Old Town, just a stand in a coffee shop – sweaty, hard work, but he was young and energetic and business was good, so after a few years he was able to open his own kopitiam on the other side of the river, not far from the bus terminal, where he continued his noodle business but rented out three other stands too. And here’s the thing – he decided to buy the lot that the coffee shop occupied, including the two storeys above, a huge investment at the time. People told him, You’re crazy, you’re too young, you’ll go bankrupt. But he thought, What the hell, even if I go bankrupt I’ll just start again, I’m only twenty-eight years old. Who’d have thought that property even in boring old Klang would increase in value so much? Business continued to be good, and when he sold up, he started not one but two new restaurants, and so on.

  He was only telling me all this to share the lessons he’d learned in life. He could see that I was the sensible type and wanted to achieve success. But no doubt I’d have my own ideas, he joked. ‘In the end, every man must follow his own path, yes or not?’

  Of course, in the meantime he had got married to Jenny’s mother, who had been a primary school teacher. His poor wife had died of cancer a few years back – she was still young, it was so unfair. Oh, he was lucky to have met her – imagine, a teacher getting married to a noodle seller! But he was clever, he had waited until he was financially secure before looking for a wife, and he was able to offer her everything she wanted. Her entire life, she
didn’t have to worry about food on the table or paying the electricity bill. ‘Will you be able to provide the same for your wife?’ he asked, smiling.

  The food arrived and Mr Teoh stood up to leave. I bade him goodbye and watched him climb into a Suzuki 4x4 parked outside. Why a restaurant owner needed an off-road car like that, I didn’t know. It’s not as if he needed to drive across the Sahara. Maybe that’s just one of those things you do when you’ve got money – you buy yourself things you don’t need.

  Unusually, that evening I found I had no appetite. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t like the food?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘No no, it’s nice.’ I helped myself to more even though I didn’t feel like it, and forced myself to eat.

  ‘Then what?’

  I shrugged. I couldn’t explain it. ‘Nyonya food is a bit too rich for my liking.’

  She laughed and ruffled my hair. ‘You have such country-boy tastebuds!’

  When we got married four months later, we moved into a small house in Taman Sentosa, just next to the Klang Bypass highway – a single-storey link-house with a cement yard out the front, almost identical to the one we’re sitting in now. You know the type, you see them all over the country on the outskirts of towns – rows and rows of them, street after street, mile after mile. East coast, west coast, north, south, everywhere the same. You could kidnap me from this house right here, blindfold me, dump me in a house in Muar, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night to take a leak and still be able to find the toilet. The second bedroom wasn’t big enough to fit anything more than a child’s bed, so we used it as a store room. Jenny wasn’t ready to have a baby, and neither was I. The way things turned out, thank goodness we didn’t – that’s what you’re thinking, and I don’t blame you.

  Sometimes, when I was in prison, the image of that tiny room crammed full of boxes and piles of folded clothes came to mind. I imagined clearing out all the junk, bit by bit, until the room was empty. Then I’d paint the walls white and add colourful stencils. A rainbow. The sun and the moon. Some stars. I imagined carrying a baby’s cot into the room with Jenny and placing it carefully away from the window. Once I’d gone through all these steps in my head, I’d think: It’s just as well we never had a baby.

  When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I accompanied my mother to Klang on one of her visits to the hospital, and I remember gazing out of the window of the bus as we travelled down that long stretch of road that led into town, flanked for miles by housing estates that had just been built, and I knew – with the kind of certainty that only a child can possess – that when I was an adult, that was where I wanted to live. I’d thought for years that it was just a fantasy, but as I arranged a loan from Mr Lai and another one from the bank, I told myself that there was no longer any need to doubt those childhood longings. As an adult, I knew it wasn’t anything fancy, but I also knew it was a decent way to start my married life.

  Almost as soon as we moved in, however, I realised just how much a person changes in fifteen years. Maybe it’s just living in this country that does this to you – maybe in Canada or Japan or Texas or places like that, where life doesn’t change so fast, people are different. My aspirations had changed – they had swelled without me even knowing, and were too big for that little house, which was already fifteen, twenty years old. All along the main road, from town to Meru, new housing estates were being built on every spare plot of land, and we could see them from our house, take in all the details of their construction as we drove past. I was embarrassed, almost ashamed, by our house – a pain exacerbated by Jenny’s pretence of hating the new houses we were forced to look at every day. ‘Those gardens are too big,’ she’d say. ‘The people are going to have problems keeping them tidy.’ Or, ‘The second storey looks too small for a house that size – the shape is all funny.’ Or, ‘The fences are too low, I’d be worried about security if I was in their shoes.’ Almost every time we drove past a construction site she would find something negative to say about those expensive new houses, as if she would hate to live in any of them – as if ours was the most wonderful dwelling place in the area.

  Things were continuing to go well for me at the farm, and I knew that if I just kept my head down, we’d be OK. At the back of my mind I had Jenny’s father’s story of humble beginnings turning into a prosperous existence. Imagining simply waking up one day and owning a business – his progression seemed so natural that I thought it would just happen to me too. To us. I was twenty-eight years old, Jenny thirty-one; time was on our side. All we had to do was keep working, and in a few years’ time we’d have more money and a bigger house, and then we could start thinking about having children.

  I was working longer and longer hours, and sometimes at weekends, in the hope that Mr Lai would reward me with some extra cash at Chinese New Year – which he did: half a month’s salary in fifty-ringgit notes. I wanted a pay rise too, and he kept promising he would do something. ‘Ah Hock, if anyone deserves a pay rise it’s you,’ he’d say from time to time, and I would just shrug my shoulders and carry on with my work, trying to hide the fact that I was excited. But each month I’d check my pay and find that it was still the same. Once he arrived at the farm very late in the day, about 6 p.m., having just driven all the way from Johor, where he’d been trying to raise some business. From the generator block I watched him get out of his car and walk slowly to the office, and when I went in there a little later he was slumped over the table, half-asleep. Without looking up he said, ‘I’m too old for this. You’re young – I should give you half the business.’

  I was so excited that my journey home that night seemed to take twice as long as usual – I couldn’t wait to get back to tell Jenny what Mr Lai had said. She’d bought some Cantonese fried noodles on the way home from work and was tipping them out from a plastic bag onto a large dish – we were eating a lot of takeouts at the time, usually quite late, after we got back from work. I said, ‘My boss is going to pass half his business to me.’ By then she was shaking some chopped green chillies from a sachet into a plastic dish, and didn’t seem bothered by what I’d said. She just breathed out – a kind of a laugh – and said, ‘Let’s wait and see.’ I wanted to shout, Can’t you see? I’m going to own half of a huge fish farm one day! I’ll be a genuine, real-life tycoon! But I let it pass, allowing her caution and doubt to hang heavy in our little house until they became real.

  Thundery without rain. Know what that means? One of the few elegant idioms I remember from school. Means ‘empty promises’. That’s exactly what they were. Who knows, maybe one day when he was seventy and I was fifty, Mr Lai might have given me half of the business as he had said, but that first mention of it turned out to be the last. After that, zero. Maybe he changed his mind, but he didn’t even talk about a pay rise as a kind of compensation. I didn’t have the guts to bring it up with him. How could I do it? It wasn’t my place to ask – paiseh, isn’t it? I’ve always been too shy to make a fuss. I was lucky to have a steady job with steady pay. No qualifications, no college diploma, nothing. I couldn’t complain.

  Jenny started working overtime three, four times a week. ‘You don’t have to,’ I told her. ‘I can manage.’ We were OK, never late with bills, had enough food to eat. I thought we were doing fine.

  ‘Those loans you took out – we’re paying too much,’ she said. She didn’t feel comfortable with debt, she wanted to be saving money, to start thinking about having a child. I’d come home late and find her sitting at the dining table with her calculator and a mass of bills and bank statements spread out in front of her. In the harsh white light of the fluorescent tube overhead she looked like a ghost that might vanish at any moment. She’d lost weight recently, and her skin was drawn. Sometimes she’d be sitting in front of the computer, playing Tetris, or looking at news of celebrities from Hong Kong, and wouldn’t acknowledge me when I walked in. I wanted to hug her, or stand behind her and massage her shoulders while I joked about Andy Lau’s perfect face being the result of p
lastic surgery, and kiss the top of her head. But she wouldn’t even turn to look at me, and in the moment of hesitation an invisible curtain fell between us, a small separation, and I’d suddenly be afraid to touch her in case she felt it was inappropriate, given how hard she’d worked all day. I know it sounds stupid – we were husband and wife, weren’t we? But I became aware of a space that belonged only to her and not us, and I didn’t want to intrude into it.

  I thought: It’s the house, this damn old house, starting to disintegrate in ways that other people would probably say were minor, of no importance – but add all those small things up and they start to weigh down on you until you’re powerless. Yes, each little problem was fixable, but together they were overwhelming us. A broken pane in the window (Never mind, you can still close it). A section of the metal grille on the front door rusting away and crumbling, actually falling off before our eyes (Don’t worry, only a cat or a small dog could get in, not even a child robber could squeeze through that). The cracked cistern, the leaky toilet that dripped all night (Can still flush, can’t it?).

  One evening I arrived home and kissed Jenny lightly on the cheek. She was lying on the sofa leafing through Her World magazine, half asleep. The TV was on, an old martial arts movie playing, but the volume was turned nearly all the way down, so all I could hear was the short clashing noise of punches and crossed swords. I went to take a shower and noticed a bad smell, which increased to a stench when I opened the bathroom door. The toilet had broken some weeks ago, and wouldn’t flush properly. We’d put a plastic pail in the bathroom, half-filled with water, to pour into the toilet after we’d used it, and sometimes it worked well, other times less so. I lifted the seat and saw that the toilet was filled with shit. Light brown, almost yellow, foamy. Flecks of it all over the bowl. I didn’t know if the disgust I felt – the bitter nausea that swelled up inside me, rising into my throat – I didn’t know if it was because of the smell or the sudden sadness I felt, a kind of helplessness standing in front of that pile of excrement. Jenny must have had diarrhoea. Maybe she’d had it all day, and hadn’t told me. How could she? She’d been at work, and so had I; we didn’t have time to speak to each other. I sluiced the mess away with the water from the bucket and filled it again. Four, five times, and still the water in the toilet was dirty. I tried to fix the flush but it was hopeless – something in the mechanism was broken beyond repair.