We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  Whenever his company got calls from a construction site or a plantation, Keong told me, he would contact the labour brokers and say, ‘How many Bangladeshis or Burmese can you get me by next month?’ Or, ‘I need eight men and six women for a new hotel in Johor by next Wednesday. Can?’ A middleman. I thought it sounded like a suitable job for him. He didn’t come in with any ideas at either end of the deal, he just got things sorted out in between. The messy stuff that no one else wanted to do – that was always his strength.

  The brokers were the ones who got the men into the country, and Keong’s company was responsible for the paperwork. Keong himself didn’t do any administration. ‘You know how bad I was at school – reading papers and contracts, that’s not for me.’ But any old fool could do that work. What Keong did was far more important, according to him at least. He had to go out into the field, drive around the country for days, making sure the foreigners were in half-decent shape when they turned up for their first day’s work. Give them enough food in the three or four days before they start their jobs. Patch them up if they’ve got any wounds or bruises. Can’t show anything ugly, no raw flesh, obvious fractures, that sort of thing – no employer likes to see men riddled with disease or carrying too many injuries. Women even more so – they have to look washed and clean. Thank goodness there weren’t that many women in the plantations. God knows what women have been through by the time they got to this country. ‘I wouldn’t like to be the one in charge of getting them in shape,’ Keong said. ‘But someone out there has to. Sit down in your seafood restaurant in KL and the Myanmar girl who’s serving you – well, chances are she didn’t look like that when she stepped off the boat.’

  Give them enough food. Patch them up. I thought of the people in the camp and wondered if any of them had open wounds. I drove fast down the narrow straight road. I was impatient to reach the wide lanes and streaming traffic of the highway. The sooner I got there, the sooner I’d leave Keong and his mess behind. I lowered all the windows to get rid of the smoke from his cigarettes. ‘You’re the same as before, always judging,’ Keong said. ‘What I do is a proper business – just like yours. You think it’s dirty work, don’t you?’

  I hesitated. ‘I don’t care what you do. It just seems a bit complicated to me. We never have these kinds of problems hiring workers at the farm.’

  ‘Problems? What do you mean? Motherfucker. How do you find guys to work, then?’

  ‘Mostly they’re friends or relatives of people who already work for us. They know we pay on time – not a lot, but always on time. They get days off, holidays. Sometimes they just turn up out of nowhere. They walk into the farm and ask for work, we ask to see their foreign worker’s card, that’s it. We don’t need to go through middlemen and brokers and all that nonsense.’

  ‘Sor hai.’ Keong laughed. ‘You run a shitty little fish farm and you think you understand everything. Little guy, let me tell you, we supply workers to all the plantations. The biggest ones. They need dozens, hundreds of men at a time. The palm oil gets exported to China, the US, Europe – everywhere. Those imported American cookies you see in the supermarket, the ones you can’t afford to buy – all made with our palm oil. You see, I’m working in an international business. And you think you can look down on me? Makes me laugh.’

  ‘I like my job. I don’t need to work for an international company to be happy.’

  He didn’t answer.

  We kept the windows down even on the highway. The noise of the traffic filled the car, swirling around us just like the smoke from Keong’s cigarettes, but its presence was comforting. I thought, Now he’ll leave me in peace. Now he realises at last that we’ve become different people.

  * * *

  In truth I should have known, even on the first day of our so-called reunion, that he was going to be hanging around for a while. When we left Ah Chan’s that evening, we drove into town separately, me following him as he led the way. I didn’t know where he was taking me; it was just like the old days, only now we were in cars, not on scooters. He wanted to have a few drinks, sing a few songs at a KTV place, and we ended up at K-Fire Karaoke. I heard it closed down some years ago, and I’m not surprised. Got raided too many times. It looked just like any other karaoke joint, but back then even I knew what kind of reputation it had. At the farm, visiting contractors used to refer to it with a smile. They talked about going there after dinner ‘for some dessert’. You had to ask discreetly, you had to look like the kind of man who’d spend a lot of money, not someone like me. There’d be women, young and not so young, who’d serve you drinks. What happened after that was up to you and your hostess. ‘It’s a free market,’ I’d hear people say. ‘You can do whatever deal you want.’

  But that night Keong didn’t want to do any deals. He didn’t ask for any girls, didn’t even look at passing women the way he used to when he was younger, didn’t stare and make comments. He ordered a bottle of Johnnie Walker, which we didn’t finish. All he wanted to do was sing. Danny Chan Pak-keung. The entire repertoire. Sometimes he stood up, holding the mike as if he was on stage, performing in a huge auditorium, his arms spreading swanlike as if he wanted to embrace the entire audience. So why do I still keep on secretly loving you he sang, facing the screen and closing his eyes as if addressing the words to himself. His voice was rough, gritty, even more so than before, and I remembered him singing the same songs more than a decade previously, when we were hanging around the streets of the capital every night, that big-city life that seemed so full of promise. Sometimes, in the half-dark of that padded KTV room, in the middle of a song, Keong would turn away from his imaginary audience and look at me while singing a line or two, and I’d notice how much he’d aged since we last met.

  And then I was singing too, with a mike in my hand, joining in the chorus to a few of the songs. I don’t know how that happened, I’d only had two drinks, and I hadn’t even finished the second one. Somebody opened the door and stumbled into the room – a middle-aged man with his shirt half-unbuttoned, mumbling, ‘Darling, where are you?’ before falling into an armchair. We helped him up and pushed him out into the corridor again. We were laughing. The music was playing loudly; we hadn’t bothered to stop the disc. Keong sat down, breathing heavily, and eased his wallet from his trouser pocket. He paused for a while before opening it and showing me a photo, tucked neatly behind a plastic cover.

  ‘My wife and baby,’ he said. I couldn’t see clearly in the gloom – the photo was hazy in the flickering light of the TV screen. Three people. A man, a woman with a young child in her arms, shot against a blue background in a studio. The man didn’t even look like Keong – he was neatly dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, buttoned all the way to the collar. I thought of showing him a photo of Jenny, but the moment seemed wrong.

  I said, ‘That’s nice.’

  He leaned back in the chair and sipped his drink. ‘I want to make some cash and start my own business. Make life good for my wife and kid. Emigrate to California. Australia. Wherever. Somewhere I don’t have to do this shit.’

  ‘Thought you loved your big-time job. You must be making decent money.’

  He stared at the screen, which was playing the kind of karaoke video that doesn’t make any sense at all, just home-made shots of people walking in parks. He looked almost sad as he turned to me and said, ‘I have a problem.’

  As he talked his voice lowered slightly, as if softened by doubt. By reality. And that made him seem more certain, more truthful, than I could remember. He’d been wanting to leave his job for some time now, but he couldn’t afford to. The work was tiring, he was on the road many days at a time, sometimes a week, ten days. He didn’t see his family enough. He’d go away to visit a plantation in Kedah or Johor, and when he came back his daughter would have learned another few words. Once he came home after a long trip up north and she spoke in a full sentence. He had the feeling he was missing out on things. On the small things that made up this thing we call life. One day he got int
o a fight with some Burmese guys who hadn’t been paid in a while. They were demanding their money, but Keong hadn’t even known about the situation, so he stood his ground. You know what I’m like. They roughed him up before disappearing into the jungle. No one could find them – not the police, not the other workers, but in truth no one tried very hard. Guess who got the blame? Five lost men – that’s a lot of money. His employers were furious. Worse still, try explaining to your small child why you’ve got a bloody bruise on your face. Papa fell down. Stupid Papa! She just stared at him, blinking. Then her face crumpled and she started to cry. Wouldn’t stop crying. That was when he thought, I must get out.

  Now there was another matter. Eighteen missing workers. Keong’s company had already paid for these men, but they never turned up. That was why he was back down here, to try to find the men and sort things out with the broker, the guy who shipped them in from abroad. If he could clear things up, his boss had promised him a bonus. When he got that money, dear God, he would resign the very next day and start his own business. He’d already thought of a plan: his uncle had connections with factories in China that made clothing for Western luxury brands. He’d heard they threw tons of clothes away – one bad stitch and a perfectly good item would be rejected. Keong would buy all those rejects and sell them here at knockdown prices.

  Still staring at the screen, he said, ‘Will you help me?’

  ‘How the hell can I help?’

  ‘You know people down here. You know all the plantations. You hear things. I’m an outsider now. If I go around asking questions, no one will help me. You’re a local.’

  I laughed. ‘In your dreams. I have a quiet life now. I don’t know anyone.’ I stood up to leave. It wasn’t late, but my head was hurting and I had an early start at the farm the next day.

  ‘I’m all on my own here,’ Keong said. His voice had dropped so low that I could barely hear him over the music. Outside, muffled, off-key voices came from the other rooms. On the screen, a carefree young couple were running through the Lake Gardens, or some other pleasant park with a boating lake in the background. They looked impossibly happy, and slightly out of focus, as people always are in those sorts of videos. I left without saying goodbye, honestly thinking that was the last time I would see Keong.

  I’m writing a book, she says.

  Book? What book.

  About you.

  I pause. What for? I thought you were doing research for your PhD.

  Well, I am. But, umm, I’m sort of thinking of turning it into a book? She says this as if it’s a question. Only it isn’t a question.

  What kind of book? I say.

  It’s a bit hard to describe, she replies. Something between biography and journalism. Narrative non-fiction, I guess. That’s what I’d call it. Or maybe true crime, only, well, different. Better. I don’t know. Publishers have so many strange ways of marketing books these days.

  Publishers? I repeat the word as if I’ve never heard it before. I know I’m coming across as stupid – that I’m turning the conversation into a sort of merry-go-round, where every so often we have to pass a point where I say, What book? Or Publishers? Narrative what?

  You’re kidding, right? I say. A book about me? My little life? No one’s going to be interested in that.

  You’d be surprised. I think a lot of people would be interested.

  You’re nuts.

  The point is this. I need your permission before I can publish anything.

  Why? You can do anything you like. I don’t care.

  Well, I do care. I wouldn’t do anything unauthorised. I’d feel very uncomfortable acting without your blessing. It’s your story, not mine. You should have the final say about whether it gets released into the world or not.

  I pause and look at her. She smiles. That same smile that transforms not just her face but the entire room, scrubbing out any possibility of sadness.

  A book, huh? What a crazy idea.

  December 7th

  Did you read in the newspapers a few months ago about a man who went berserk and killed his entire family? Up in Penang. They ran a small chicken factory – the kind of place where live chickens are delivered to be slaughtered, cleaned and packed for sale in the supermarkets. The family lived in two shipping containers inside the factory, one stacked on top of the other. Their entire home consisted of these two metal bedrooms. I couldn’t make out from the photos whether they had any windows or not – I don’t think the photographer was interested in capturing anything other than the blood on the mattresses. The man – a young guy around thirty, I think – turns up at the factory and gets into an argument with his mother and her boyfriend. It’s 2 a.m., and the workers in the factory are getting ready for a long shift slaughtering and plucking chickens. Imagine that, plucking chickens while it’s still dark outside every day of your life. Machines are whirring all around them, the chickens squawking their heads off. The workers don’t think anything about it – the guy’s got a temper, he’s always shouting at his mother. His brother hears the commotion and comes down from the top container. He’s carrying his two-year-old son, who’s sleeping in his arms. We don’t know what the argument is about. Suddenly the guy pulls out a handgun, a 9mm pistol, and shoots them all. Point blank. From that range, you can’t miss. Then he drives off in a Toyota Hilux and the police can’t find him. Maybe he just drove over the bridge and up into Kedah and Thailand – who knows. And all that time, the Nepalese workers are plucking those squawking birds while the family are lying dead in their cramped shipping containers.

  Police ask everyone who knew the family, but no one knows for sure why he did it. Killing a stranger is one thing, but your own mother? Your brother? His baby kid? Some people say it must have been drugs. Others that it was over money. Others that it was because he hated his mother’s boyfriend. Others that it was shame. Mother gives him thousands of bucks to fund his chicken stall at the market, but then one day some guy from City Hall turns up and takes everything away because there’s a problem with his licence. He’s lost all his money – his mother’s money – and doesn’t know what went wrong. Maybe he didn’t bribe the right person, maybe he forgot to fill in part of some form, but whatever the case, his business is finished, and he’s so ashamed he can’t face the family. Can’t look at them without feeling a terrible pain somewhere in his skull. Every time they stare at him it’s as if they’re accusing him – of what he doesn’t quite know, but they’re accusing him. Of everything.

  But the truth is that there is no because. And because there is no because, there is also no why. He did what he did. Sometimes things happen that way. Or maybe the because was buried so far in his past that it’s impossible to figure out what it is, so it ceases to be real. For many months, while waiting for my trial, and afterwards in prison, I tried to find the reasons behind what I did. I tried to excavate the layers of my thoughts, my memories, digging patiently the way I used to in the mud on our farm when I was a child, and later at the fish farm. Sometimes you hit a layer of rock, other times the mud was compacted so solidly that your cangkul couldn’t dig through it, no matter how high you raised it over your head, how hard you brought it crashing down into the earth. That was how I felt. I wasn’t going to give up. I would sit on my bed with my eyes closed, sinking deeper into the mess of people and sounds in my head, of events lasting five seconds or five years, trying to recall anything in my past that might have given me a clue to why I’d done what I did. A reason for those five, ten seconds. When you have so much time on your hands there’s little else to do. But those hours, those long nights alone, searching – they yielded nothing. That’s why I don’t question myself in the same way these days. Prayers are all I need. There’s no point in questioning God’s will.

  The month Keong reappeared in Klang, I was busier at work than I’d ever been. The farm had just taken a huge order from a supermarket chain in Singapore, but Mr Lai’s mood was as bad as ever. Said he was stressed. ‘Stressed from success,’ Jezmine
said without looking up from her computer screen one day. ‘You men are useless. Business is bad, you get grumpy. Business is good, you get grumpy. Can’t handle anything. Look at him – doesn’t even have time to dress himself properly or comb his hair in the morning. I can’t even look at him these days, all that dandruff on his shoulders.’ She laughed as she scribbled a note on a piece of paper – she wrote so quickly, typed even faster. ‘Lucky your wife takes care of you,’ she said to me. ‘At least you look presentable.’

  Outside, we could see Mr Lai gesticulating at some of the Indonesian workers. They weren’t working hard enough, he’d complained to me, and it was true, a few of them seemed slower than usual. We were building more ponds and installing an irrigation system to fulfil the order from Singapore – a long-term contract with payment guaranteed every quarter. I’d devised the new pumps, imagined how the water would flow across the land, filling the hollows in the earth. I thought of my mother, bent over with a shovel in her hands, scooping out mounds of wet mud from our fields. I remembered our little farm, which wasn’t even a farm but a stretch of soil and thorns, and thought how it might have looked if we’d had the technology I was now building, and the absurdity of it made me smile. That miserable unyielding land would never have given us anything, no matter what we did to it. Earth and water – that was my livelihood once again, but now I had money and machines on my side.

  Even Mr Lai was happy with my plan, and promised to give all the men a two-hundred-ringgit bonus when the construction works were completed. ‘I’m such a softie,’ he said, ‘always paying you guys too much.’ He never promised to give me a bonus, though, and I wasn’t expecting one. It was enough for me to see that the men were working well, darting across the yard, joking as they worked. Two hundred bucks isn’t a lot of money to you, and not even to them – let’s face it, even a packet of fried noodles in a shitty roadside stall costs five ringgit a throw, so how long can that kind of cash last? But in these kinds of jobs, small gestures like that mean something. They signify kindness, even though the person making the gesture doesn’t do it out of kindness but as a sort of automated response. I remembered my time in KL, working as a waiter. Sometimes people would give me one, two ringgit as a tip, and for some minutes afterwards I’d be walking with more energy and being just a bit more polite to customers than usual. They’d hand me the notes without even looking at me, but still, I’d feel that I was important. That I existed.