We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  ‘Take a rest, Ma.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’m fine.’

  But when she tried again to lift the bag she could hardly move. She bent over, her hands resting on her knees, breathing heavily. I could smell her hot sour breath from where I was standing.

  ‘Ma, please, go and drink some water. I’ll finish this.’

  ‘It’s OK. Give me a minute.’ She tried to stand up straight, but instead sank to the ground. I rushed over, and helped her up to a sitting position, leaning against the low pile of sandbags.

  ‘That’s better.’ She breathed heavily. ‘I’ll be OK.’

  I looked up at the sky. Rain clouds had gathered out at sea – thick and slow-rolling, the colour of coal, blotting out the sun and casting a twilight glow across the land, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. We’d already had the first of the rains that year, heavy drizzles that would turn to steady downpours. I continued to drag the sandbags myself, feeling the muscles in my legs and back thicken and strain with each one I lifted into position. My mother remained propped up against the sandbags, watching me. She waved, but made no attempt to get up. We both knew that I would have to finish the barrier on my own. ‘Keep going!’ she yelled, and pumped her fist. My knees felt as though they would buckle at any moment, but I forced my body to do what it needed to do. I was a wuxia hero. I was invincible. I had to defend us against the monster from the sea. I heard my mother’s hearing aid squeal and whine, like the noise of an alien spaceship. I wanted to say, Don’t worry, I’ll make sure everything’s OK, but I knew she wouldn’t hear me.

  Her back was bad for some days, and that Saturday I had to take the vegetables to sell at the market myself. When I got home I started to dig a trench that ran the length of the sandbags, so that if any water penetrated the barrier we’d have a second line of defence. The hard work was worth it, we said – an investment for the future. It wasn’t just for this year, but for all the years ahead. Who knew when the next big tides were going to be? From time to time my mother’s back would feel a bit better, and she’d start to work again, but it would give way within minutes, and in the end she had to stay indoors.

  ‘I have no energy,’ she complained. ‘I’m getting so old.’ She must have pulled a major muscle, because the pain was now in her stomach as well as her back. It was true that she hadn’t been eating well. The harvests hadn’t been good because of the rain – a lot of vegetables had rotted in the wet soil, and we hadn’t been able to sell as much as usual. She’d lost her appetite, and I thought it was because of the stress – we both did.

  When the first swells appeared we had no idea the tides would be as strong and high as they turned out to be. I heard the waves gathering in the night, and when I walked out of the house I found my mother already standing on the bank of sandbags, watching the sea rise. The rocky beach a few hundred yards away had been smothered by a foamy wash, and we knew that by morning it would have reached us.

  ‘Better get some sleep,’ my mother said. We went back inside and she told me to push some sandbags against the door, ‘Just in case,’ but we both knew that it was a certainty, not a possibility.

  It was still dark when I heard the noise. The rushing of the wind, I thought. Then a low groaning – as if a monster had actually emerged from the sea. Then a silence. I didn’t think I’d fallen asleep, but I obviously had, because the sounds came to me as hazily as in a dream, and I couldn’t be sure of what I was hearing. What woke me was the touch of water. I turned over in bed and let my arm fall over the side. My fingers felt cold and wet. I jolted awake and sat up in bed, looking at the silvery black slick just a few inches below me. It wasn’t a dream, I knew that at once. Things were floating in the water – my canvas shoes, my slippers, some clothes. In the dark they looked like dead fish.

  This is the sea, I thought. The sea is in my bedroom.

  I stepped off my bed into the cold salty water, slowly, not knowing what to expect underfoot, but it was just the floor of the house, reassuring and solid. I walked to the door, forced open by the water, and into the main room. My mother was already standing there, trying to prise open the door, which was wedged shut by the sandbags. I dipped my arms into the water, lifting my chin to keep my head above the surface, and pulled the sandbags as far as I could. We squeezed through the door and slipped outside. All around us we saw only what we had seen inside the house. The sea.

  There was no distinction in the landscape – everything had turned to water. We waded waist-deep, trying to figure out the strangeness of our new world. Underfoot, everything felt uncertain. Where was the concrete platform outside the house, or the line of heavy earthenware pots in which we grew herbs? The sea had consumed everything. All we could see was the swirling surface of the water, as slick as petrol. We looked out into the dark and could not discern the vegetable plots or the ponds or the sandbags, or even the bushes and trees around the farm. Neither of us spoke. We walked until the ground beneath our feet became too soft and uncertain for us to continue, and then headed back to the house, which at least offered us a sense of boundaries, with its walls and roof, even though it was no longer the house we had known just a few hours previously.

  ‘What are we going to do, Ma?’ I asked.

  She didn’t answer. At first I thought it was because she was in shock. That she was too scared to answer. Then I realised she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid, and couldn’t hear what I was saying. She hadn’t had time to put it in before the tide arrived, and now it was lost in the floodwater.

  We found the ladder and climbed up onto the roof with as many things as we could gather from the cupboards – anything that hadn’t yet been claimed by the water. Two candles. Some clothes, bundled up in a raffia bag. Biscuits. The tin of money that represented all our savings. We’d seen it floating in the water, knocking against the wall of my mother’s bedroom as if to remind us it was there. The tiles of the roof were slippery, but at the top there was a flat concrete ledge that we could straddle comfortably.

  From our vantage point we began to reconfigure what we understood of the land in which we lived. The place that was once our home. The sea had erased everything we had thought unmoveable. Scrubbed it all out and absorbed it. Our ponds, full of fish. Our farm. All of that was now part of the sea. As we waited for daybreak my mother pulled me close to her. The wind was gusting, blowing patterns on the surface of the water, sometimes ruffling it into waves. Occasionally there would be a surge in the sea, and the entire watery landscape would tremble and swell. At last the skies began to lighten, turning a faint blue-grey.

  I can only recall that first spring tide in any detail. There was another one the year after, less powerful; and another the following year, stronger even than the first. The others felt inevitable, as if they were predestined. That first year, the waters subsided a few days later, and we tried to rebuild what we had lost. The second year, we didn’t even try. Global warming, people said – strong tide surges would be normal from now on. Apply for a subsidy or loan to buy a new place, someone in the village suggested half-heartedly. But even at that age I knew, like everyone else, that it was hopeless. We were the wrong race, the wrong religion – who was going to give us any help? Not the government, that’s for sure. We knew that for no-money Chinese people like us, there was no point in even trying.

  It didn’t matter. By that time my mother’s stomach and back pains had got so bad that one day she collapsed on the street in Kuala Selangor and had to be taken to hospital. She’d been stressed, she hadn’t been eating properly, she told the nurse when she woke up in the ward. But what she had thought was due to her bad diet turned out to be a tumour in her colon the size of a small apple. The doctor was angry. ‘Why didn’t you get it checked earlier?’ she yelled at me. ‘It’s been growing for at least ten years,’ she said, pointing at the fuzzy circle on the x-rays that she held in front of my face as if it was my fault. I just shrugged. She explained that there were treatments in KL or Singapore that might possibl
y shrink the tumour, but she wasn’t all that hopeful. My mother said she didn’t want to see any more doctors, that she needed to face her destiny. She tried to make her reasoning sound Buddhist, but the truth was that we had no means of paying for the hospitals. She struggled on for another year before her body gave up. I’d already made the decision to leave for KL to find work. Her death made it easy for me to leave what was left of the land and the house we owned.

  When I think back to that period of our lives, what comes to mind isn’t the floods or the way the farm looked after the water had subsided, flattened by a blanket of grey mud and sea-sand. It isn’t the storms, or the house with its cracked walls. It isn’t the early promise of wealth either, when my mother’s market stall was doing well and she came home every day with bags of sweets and cakes as a treat. What I remember is our days working on the farm – my silly, happy fantasies of being a martial-arts hero wandering the countryside slaying beasts and helping the oppressed. In these images that come back to me, clear as sunlight, I am slashing away at the dense foliage, or digging the thick mud. I feel like a hero. I am a hero. I look up and see my mother by the ponds. Squatting so she’s close to the ground, repairing the small nets she’ll soon throw over the water to snare the week’s catch. Her hearing aid is playing up, crackling with static and squealing its high-pitched whine. I don’t know why I’m smiling.

  III

  DECEMBER

  December 4th

  The encampment lay in a scrubby bit of forest, scattered among the trees and bushes, clearly visible from the road. A row of tarpaulins was stretched between tree trunks just a few yards from the edge of the road – grey-brown canvas and bright-blue plastic sheets that you couldn’t fail to notice if you were driving along the long, straight route that linked the plantation towns to the highway, and further on to the coast. It was a road like any other in the area, cutting through palm-oil estates and scrubland and patches of forest. Occasionally you’d see a small abandoned wooden shelter that might once have been a bus stop, or a food stall. You could be driving down the road, make a turn at a crossroads, and suddenly find yourself on another, identical stretch of cracked tarmac, and soon you’d be lost. You wouldn’t be sure if the makeshift camp you glimpsed between the trees was the same one you saw twenty minutes before. In any case, there are so many of these kinds of temporary dwelling places in this part of the country. So many temporary workers. If you want to hide a large group of men, this is the best way to do it: in full view of anyone who chooses to notice them.

  Even though Keong knew where the camp was, we sped right past, and had to reverse a few hundred yards to get back to it. I was driving, and Keong was smoking, making his way steadily through his pack of Salems. We were always taking small detours to track down shops that sold them. He was fussy, wouldn’t smoke anything else. The window was down, but the hot air that swirled around the car didn’t seem to chase away the smoke. It had taken us only two brief meetings to fall into an established pattern – I drove, while Keong smoked and talked constantly. First time, it was because he had a problem with his car. The next time it was because he said he wanted to appreciate the landscape. ‘It’s been so long. I realise now that I really miss this place.’

  He’d point out things he remembered from the past, from way back in the nineties – a stretch of jungle that flooded one year, when the rains didn’t stop for three days and nights, and the rivers and monsoon drains overflowed. For a few days afterwards, under heavy grey skies, the trunks of the trees were submerged, with only their leaves protruding from the muddy water like giant origami decorations floating on the surface of a pond. A dirt track where a wild boar charged at us while we were cycling early one evening. It had its babies with it, it was aggressive, it really scared us! The stretch of the main road where he had his first crash on his scooter – lorries carrying their loads of palm-oil seeds would squeeze him too close to the concrete kerb, and more than a few times he’d been forced off the road. Once he ended up in a ditch. There – the noodle place he’d taken that girl to on his first date, my God, what was her name?

  I let him talk. I nodded. Sometimes I laughed, just to give him the impression that I was confirming the clarity of his memories. I never had the heart to tell him that he’d got it wrong – that the stretch of jungle he remembered had been cut down years ago, the trees felled in the space of a week to make way for a new plantation that was now so mature, the palm-oil trees so tall, that it seemed to have belonged to that landscape since the beginning of time. The noodle stall he talked about was actually on the other side of Sekinchan, and it too had disappeared years ago. How do you expect a ramshackle place like that to survive more than a few years? As for other details – maybe he was right. I don’t remember exactly where we were when we crossed paths with the mother wild boar and her babies, or where we saw a monitor lizard eating the carcass of a goat. I just nodded in agreement when Keong dredged up those memories. They’d ceased to matter to me.

  He wouldn’t stop talking about the past, and soon I found myself driving faster than I should have, just to reach our destination and put an end to our one-sided conversation. That was why I went past the camp without realising it was where we were meant to stop. He was still talking as we got out of the car – recounting one of the endless antics of Auntie Ah Hua, who had developed a taste for whisky after her marriage broke up, and used up all her savings on Johnnie Walker Red Label and Mekhong, and often appeared drunk at the temple, which everyone thought was funny – while I strode on ahead. I could barely remember those events.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s where the workers stay before they move into their permanent jobs.’

  ‘So what kind of work are they doing right now?’

  Keong lit another cigarette, and shook the box to see how many he had left. Almost none. ‘You dumb or what? They’ve got no work yet. Why do you think I’m so stressed? Twenty men sitting around doing nothing for three weeks. Think of the money I’m losing.’

  The camp looked deserted. The air was cloudy with the last remnants of an open fire slowly dying in the sticky air – I got the feeling that someone had thrown damp leaves on the embers to hide its glow. The smoke that rose from the pile of foliage and ash was thin and blue, and made the shapes that lay in the shade of the tarpaulins indistinct. But as we got close to the first of the shelters I noticed movement through the haze. One of those dead mounds – of earth? Of vegetation? – began to move, and a man emerged from the gloom.

  ‘Haven’t heard from you in two days.’ He addressed Keong in bad Malay, mixed up with some words from a foreign language I didn’t understand. In fact he said something like, Two days something something never something call phone. But I could make out what he meant all the same.

  ‘Been busy.’

  ‘We’re out of food. The men haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. Had to walk to the stream to get water. Some of them are sick.’

  Keong kept striking his lighter, but the air was so humid that the flame wouldn’t catch. ‘Let me see them.’

  As we walked through the camp the motionless shapes under the tarpaulins began to stir and unfurl into human form, men – all men – stretching into life, sitting up, coughing, running their hands across their faces. A few of them looked at us, and though I returned their glances I looked away quickly. Our eyes barely met, but in those two, three seconds, I knew that we shared something. A sense of shame. A desire to flee – to escape that camp, that forest, that country, the whole universe that made that life possible. Did they avert their gaze before I did? One of us blinked first and lowered our head to avoid seeing the other, but I couldn’t tell who it was. Probably me. I didn’t need to examine them any closer to figure out what they were, or what they were doing there – I didn’t need Keong or anyone else to explain. Once they realised that they were in no immediate danger, they lay back down and continued to rest. What else could they do, I thought. Rest.

  ‘
They’re not the ones we’re looking for,’ Keong said as we drove away.

  ‘They’re Bangladeshi?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s where most of the labour comes from these days. Many from Myanmar and Nepal too, but in this area I handle mainly Bangladesh and Indons. Better for plantation work.’

  I didn’t ask any questions. At that point I was still hoping that Keong would go away and leave me in peace, and I didn’t want to show any interest in his business.

  On the drive back to Klang he explained that he worked as a ‘labour contractor’, that his employers were a company – a real, proper company with an office – that brought in people from all sorts of companies to work in all sorts of jobs. Construction sites, plantations – but these days also in hotels, restaurants, as toilet cleaners, you name it. The kind of work that locals don’t have the taste for now – and even if we did, what employer would give us the work? They can get two Bangladeshis for the price of one local. ‘It’s like at the supermarket,’ said Keong. ‘Who can resist the buy-one-get-one-free offer? That’s why they’re everywhere. Walk into any shop or eating place and a foreigner will be serving you.’

  ‘Really? I don’t see so many Bangladeshis around here,’ I said.

  ‘You must be blind. Anyway, up in KL they’re everywhere. The other day I was waiting for my wife at the hair salon and I heard an old woman say, “I don’t want a foreigner touching me, I don’t want that dark-skinned person touching my hair.” And I couldn’t help myself, I said, “Wei, Auntie, better get used to it, because dark-skinned foreigners are here to stay. No one else going to be shampooing your hair any time soon.”’