We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  I nodded.

  She turned towards Uncle Kiat. ‘He’s really so happy,’ she said.

  I began to understand the widening gulf between her and the people of the village, and knew that it was to do with her decision to move in with Uncle Kiat. I felt a separation between us and our neighbours, as if the earth was opening up and dividing the landscape in two. On one side was my mother and Uncle Kiat, on the other, everyone else. I was her child, I should have been happy standing on her side, but all I wanted was to leap across the chasm and be with everyone else.

  In the end I started to drift away from the rest of the village too. I was fearful of hearing things about my mother that would hurt me. I stopped hanging out with the other kids, especially the older ones, who would have more knowledge of the ways of adults, and less fear of expressing what they knew. I roamed the paths and tracks that cut through the countryside, going further and further afield. I’d always done that, but in that period of my growing-up years I can’t remember anything else. The further I walked, the more the landscape seemed to close in on me, suffocating me. I wondered how old I’d have to be before I could leave home and work in another city, or preferably another continent. Seventeen, eighteen? An eternity away.

  I didn’t realise it then, but there was to be no return to the fold, not even when the original cause of our separation from the other people in the village had been scrubbed from our record. About a year after this, when we’d been living at Uncle Kiat’s for about two years, I came home and found my mother sitting on the edge of the bed. This was a surprise. I’d grown used to arriving home at dusk to find an empty house. Grown used to the comforting bitterness of knowing that my mother was out with Uncle Kiat. I’d become accustomed, above all, to having the room to myself, as my mother had given up all pretences and was spending her nights in Uncle Kiat’s room. ‘It’ll be nicer for you,’ she’d said, ‘now that you’re growing up.’ She was reading a newspaper when I entered the room that day. When she saw me she put it down and folded it neatly. I stared at her, expecting a scolding. You’re late. You’re lazy. You haven’t cleaned the house. Such admonishments were common, and I never knew when they’d be thrown my way. Instead she said in a flat tone of voice, ‘We’re moving out. Very soon.’

  The clarity of the statement was confusing to me. This time it wasn’t obscured by a mass of other information – there was nothing for me to decipher, no codes or signals for me to piece together. Maybe it was because I was older that my mother trusted me with this directness, but from that moment I knew that she had changed yet again, and that this new certainty and decisiveness would stay with her forever. ‘It’ll be much better for us,’ she said as I stood blinking, unable fully to digest what she was saying. ‘You wait and see.’ That night she slept in the bedroom with me, and though I wish I could say it was a relief, and that I was happy, the truth is that I found it impossible to sleep. Her sudden presence after many months unsettled me. Her breathing, turning to a soft rumbling noise now and then. The way she sighed deeply in her sleep – as if a word had become stuck in her throat and emerged only as a twisted groan.

  The day we left, Uncle Kiat hung around the house, pretending to wipe the floors with a bleach-soaked rag, but I could see that he was watching us pack our things. Every time he walked past the open door of our room he’d look in, and sometimes he’d cough, as if to make sure we knew he was there. But my mother ignored him, didn’t once acknowledge his presence. She was checking the empty drawers one last time when Uncle Kiat appeared at the door. ‘You don’t have to go today, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘You can wait until your new place is ready to move into.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my mother replied without looking at him. ‘The sooner we leave, the happier your family will be.’

  Uncle Kiat looked at the floor. He unfolded the rag he was clutching and rubbed his fingers on it. He continued to stare at a spot on the floor as if he wanted to scrub it away.

  My mother zipped up the last of our bags and started to carry them towards the door. As I helped her I noticed that we had less than we’d arrived with.

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to drive you there?’ Uncle Kiat said. ‘It’s a long way.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ my mother replied. ‘Save your petrol to go visit your parents in Kuantan. Anyway, my son will help me. I’m an unmarried woman who already has a child – remember?’

  I never saw Uncle Kiat after that day. I had no reason to go near his house, and not long afterwards I heard that he’d moved to the east coast to join his cousins there. Once he was gone, people in the village would occasionally refer to him as that good-for-nothing man. When I was a bit older I learned that he’d had an injury of some kind and been laid off work from the glove factory. He’d managed to arrange a compensation payment, which made him think he was rich, and better than everyone else. All those days when I thought he was at work, it turns out he was just driving into Klang and hanging around in coffee shops, watching the world go by.

  My mother never mentioned him, or the time we spent living with him. There was no need to – we both understood what had happened, and neither of us wanted to discuss that time of our lives. Besides, we had new challenges on our hands now, which kept us occupied day and night.

  Let’s go out, she says. Buy some food. I don’t think you’re eating properly, that’s why you get sick.

  Food? What food? I’m the healthiest person in the world.

  You need to eat more healthily. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Nuts, grains. Decent protein.

  Curry laksa doesn’t have protein, meh?

  Actually, no. Not much. It has plenty of fat, though. Let’s go to the mall, get some groceries, and then I’ll drive you back. We won’t get anything expensive, just decent basics. When you were ill a couple of weeks back I looked through your cupboards and there was nothing.

  We’ve finished early today. Our talk didn’t last as long as it sometimes does. Maybe I had nothing special to say. Sure, I say. Why not.

  In the mall we head to Giant supermarket, and she pulls a trolley from the row of them at the entrance.

  Why do we need such a huge trolley? I say. Just a small basket is enough. I don’t need much food.

  Let’s just see how it goes.

  We go straight to the fresh produce section and she begins to put things into the trolley, so quickly it seems she hasn’t even looked properly at what she’s taken. She chooses things I would never think of buying – freshly sliced fruit, neatly wrapped in plastic boxes. Fuji apples from Taiwan. Big bunches of leafy vegetables. Shiitake mushrooms.

  Wai, this stuff is too expensive.

  It’s good for your skin, she says, holding up a big purple dragon fruit.

  I can’t afford it, I don’t have money.

  Don’t worry about that. She turns away from me and continues putting things in the trolley. I try to keep up with her but she moves quickly. She’s mapped everything out in her head. It’s like the way she questions me during our talks. She has mental lists and she works through them without being distracted. Packets of dried herbs for soup. A whole fresh fish. A chicken. Pork ribs.

  Why so much? It’ll all go rotten.

  We’ll freeze the meat so you can use it whenever you want. How about some New Zealand beef? You like beef?

  I don’t eat beef.

  I don’t either. In fact I’m vegetarian. But I think you should eat meat. You need it right now. Shame there isn’t good organic meat. All this is just pretty … industrial. Anyway. You need to eat.

  By the time we reach the checkout, the trolley is so full that it keeps banging against the shelves and other people’s legs. It takes us a long time to load everything onto the conveyor.

  You pack, I’ll pay, she says.

  After a long while, when the bags are nearly full and she is getting ready to pay, I hear her scream. Oh my God. She is staring at a shelf not far from us, at a row of tinned food. Oh my God.

  T
he Burmese guy at the checkout turns to look. The other people in the queue behind us do so too. One young man looks concerned. We can’t see what she’s staring at.

  What’s the matter? I ask.

  There. Oh my God. Fuck.

  A rat darts out from under the shelves, across the aisle to the shelves opposite. After a few seconds it scurries back again. Oh my God, that’s disgusting. Someone call management!

  The checkout guy starts to laugh. The people in the queue chuckle too. Everyone relaxes. They continue to pack their groceries or check their phones.

  What the hell are you people laughing at? Can’t you see there’s vermin over there? We need to do something about it!

  It’s just a rat, I say, packing the last of the bags. It’s no big deal.

  What do you mean, just a rat? You’re going to just let it run around like that? Call your manager, she says to the checkout guy, lodge a report right now.

  Miss. Hey, miss, someone calls from the queue. It’s an older man. Could you please hurry? My legs are aching.

  Yeah, someone else says. We have to go back to work.

  You’re all just going to stand there and do nothing? she says. Where’s the manager? I’m going to report it! Otherwise the whole place is soon going to be infested and diseased!

  I gather the bags into the trolley and begin pushing it to the car park. Forget it, I say. It’s just a small thing.

  What the hell are you smiling at? she says. It’s not funny.

  Nothing, I say. She keeps talking about the rat all the way home, and even after we’ve put all the shopping away, she’s still grumbling about how no one did anything. That’s the problem with this country, we let stuff happen that shouldn’t happen, we turn a blind eye to little things, then the rot sets in. No one cares about anything any more.

  I look at the fridge. I’ve never seen it so full. I want to thank her for all the things she’s bought for me, but she’s in a bad mood until she leaves, and I can’t find the right time to tell her that I’m really grateful.

  November 7th

  We bought the piece of land with the last of my mother’s savings, a small amount of money I didn’t even know she had. Doing the kind of jobs she’d done, you wouldn’t have expected her to have put any money aside, but she had. Just enough to buy an acre and a half of scrubland, with a small house already on it, run-down and full of roosting bats, but with a roof that didn’t have too many holes, and surprisingly solid walls built from cinder blocks on a concrete floor. I could remember the man who used to live in it, Pak Awang, who collapsed one day from a heart attack, and when he came home had to hobble around the place with the aid of a walking stick. Poor old man, people said. All on his own in a place like that. When he finally got too weak to walk, his children moved him up to Shah Alam, close to where they lived. In only five years, his land – a small vegetable plot and two fish ponds – had turned wild, reclaimed by nature so you couldn’t tell it had recently been home to a human being. Long grass obscured the shape of the land, the prickly shrubs he’d planted as boundaries had meshed together, and small trees had taken root, blending into the forest beyond. The ponds were shrouded by weeds and looked like puddles of marshy water. We couldn’t even get near them that first day.

  I remembered what the people in the village had said about Pak Awang – why would anyone want to live so far from everyone else? Now I knew. For my mother and me, isolation was our saviour.

  ‘The land is messy because that guy was old,’ my mother said as we set about cleaning the house. ‘Besides, he was alone.’ She was attacking the rough, bare concrete walls with a wire brush while I mopped the floor. She stopped for a moment and looked at me. ‘There are two of us. It’ll be easy.’

  She was determined to turn that patch of land into a small fertile farm, with vegetables and maybe some tilapia that we could sell at the market. It would all be ours, we wouldn’t need to depend on anyone else. No one could sack her, no one could evict us. We were secure now. We were the masters – of our own piece of earth, of our futures. And so we set about clearing the land even before the house was patched up; the rich red earth was going to provide us with our income. We had two spades, a small axe and a rusty parang, whose curved blade bore traces of red paint, as dark as blood. That was the tool my mother used more than any other, hacking away at the undergrowth with long, powerful strokes. From twenty or thirty yards away I’d look up and see a sapling shaking as though caught in a gust of wind, and I’d know that my mother was chopping at its base, and soon it would topple and fall. She worked with a concentration so intense that it blocked out the rest of the world, and sometimes when I called out to her she wouldn’t hear me, wouldn’t stop until she had managed to slash all the branches from a bush. Often I’d stand and watch for a few moments. The rhythmic arc of her arm. The strength of her back as it curved to bring the blade down onto the foliage, time and time again. She moved methodically, as if she knew the effect of every cut of the parang – as if she was trying to match her strength to that of nature, and she knew she could win. I don’t know what my father did for work, or even what he looked like, but I know that I inherited my capacity for physical labour from my mother. I was not yet thirteen, and my body was ready to imitate my mother’s. I copied her movements, learned to use the axe with speed and certainty, until after just a couple of days I no longer had to think about what I was doing. The tools became part of me.

  At the end of the third day we stood on a mound of branches that we’d chopped down, balancing carefully on the springy pile. The land looked barely different from how it had when we started. The sea was just a few hundred yards away, shimmering in the late-afternoon sun, flat and waveless that day. The impossibility of our task lay before us. We’d worked without pause for nearly three days, and we hadn’t made any difference to the landscape. My mother went back to the house without saying a word, leaving me to contemplate the days ahead. We had no choice but to continue.

  It took us three or four weeks to clear the land. I became so used to working with blades of all sorts that when I closed my eyes all I could see was the slashing and ripping of foliage, the splintering of wood. In that short time I had learned to wield those tools as skilfully as a martial-arts disciple trained in the Eighteen Forms of Combat. It wasn’t just my arms that had grown accustomed to this new awareness – I could use either hand to chop at a stump of wood, even though I wrote with my right hand – but my back, arcing and twisting to support my shoulders, and my legs, planted firmly on the ground. I could feel my body filling out, growing stronger and surer. I moved with the assurance of someone older, swifter. Sometimes, cutting away at the base of a tree with the same repetitive action, I’d imagine that I was a hero from the wuxia stories I’d started to read, wandering the countryside redressing the wrongs of an oppressed people. Old villagers bullied by unscrupulous landlords, isolated farming communities preyed upon by bandits – I would save them all, my elegant weapons cutting through the air with noble authority. Sword, staff, spear and broadsword: I had achieved total mastery of all of them from years of practice, and I could even slay the demons that roamed the country, terrorising all those who tried to confront them.

  In one of my favourite reveries, I pictured our own village being menaced for years by a monster that rose from the sea in the form of a white half-dragon-half-cat. No one understood its history or origins, or where it lived and why it chose to ravage our village. We only knew that it had always been there, from the earliest days of our existence, and even before. Some said it represented our sins from former lives, others that it was part of our karma – either way, there was nothing we could do about it. We didn’t know how to predict its appearances, though some thought they were linked to the cycles of the moon. It would snake its way silently out of the sea and devour the livestock – the goats tethered in the yards and the chickens in the coops would disappear at night, and sometimes small children too. Old folk and people with illnesses would be found dead
in their beds in the morning – from fright, from the curse of the beast. The Night of the Monster. We’d realise it only when it was too late. The strong, healthy men and women knew it was futile trying to combat the beast – it was an understanding passed down from generation to generation. Lock your doors, mind your own business, and maybe you’ll remain unscathed, your family frightened but alive.

  People had tried to fight the monster in the past, and each time they had been crushed, their bodies mutilated and left behind as proof of the creature’s power. This continued until I was born. I, humble little Ah Hock, who no one noticed, was devoting my childhood to training my mind and body, every day under the blinding sun. Not even the monster itself would know I existed. But I did. And that was its mistake, underestimating someone like me. Because I was there, improving myself with every cut of the blade, and one night there I was, standing at the end of the lane that led down to the inlet from which the awful creature rose. Die, evil demon! I am the vision of your hell! The thick tangle of vines and branches warped into the flesh of the monster for me. I hacked and beat at it with all my might, feeling my razor-sharp blades sink into the denseness of it. I didn’t stop until I had vanquished the beast. Mortally wounded but not quite dead, it slithered back into the sea, fearful now of the people it had terrorised for so many years.

  The following morning the people of the village would see the trail of monster blood in the fields, and know they were at last free. They would not know the identity of their wuxia hero, but some would whisper as they gathered at home to celebrate, It was Ah Hock who saved us all.

  Those elaborate fantasies kept me occupied during the long hours working on the land. I slipped into such daydreams as easily as my mother tumbled into a deep sleep at night. I’d stay awake for a while after she fell asleep. I wanted to be sure she was resting before I surrendered to sleep myself. It didn’t matter much to me if I slept or not. Tomorrow, I thought, in the full light of day, I’ll have the chance to dream again.