We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

  I stood for a few moments looking at the ponds, the surface of the water ruffled evenly by the jets of water coursing through the pumps. Beyond them, the mouth of the river fringed by small trees that would soon be half-submerged by the tide. And further on, the mouse-grey sea, flat and calm as it often was.

  What would I do when Mr Lai sacked me the following week? I could slip away before he arrived and saw the extent of the damage, vanish overnight just like migrant workers do. Or I could hang on, try to salvage my position. (But how? Impossible.) I could ask Jezmine to take me along when she went hunting for a new job. That was it, that was the solution. She’d take pity on me, find some way of finding me decent work wherever she found some. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said she’d ease swiftly into something new, and probably better. She didn’t fear rejection – not because she was young, but because she knew she could survive in the world. In fact more than survive; she could control what happened in her life. She was good with people – so good that it surprised me sometimes, hearing her speak on the phone or watching her at meetings. Her ease, her confidence. My astonishment was so sharp that on occasion I experienced it as a sort of wonder that turned into a brief pain.

  We never talked about her family or her childhood, just as we’d always avoided mine, despite the numerous mentions of my being a local boy. But I knew she wasn’t so different from me. We understood each other. When she looked at me perhaps she remembered a brother or cousin she had, someone not as quick-witted as she was. It wasn’t unusual in families like ours. The older boy wants to pull rank, but never can, because his younger sister or cousin is smarter and braver, and in the end it’s the young girl who has to help the boy with his homework and translate his furious adolescent shouting into something their parents can understand and accept. And because she does that she starts to pity him; but her pity also attaches her to him. He is hapless, she is clever; so she has to look after him. I saw that all the time in our village, the bright girls who should have moved away to the city and never come back, but instead chose to stay behind to run the household while their kind, slow brothers fished the empty seas and brought no money home. Pity. That was why Jezmine would help me get work. She felt sorry for me.

  I had already worked this out in my mind as I started to walk back to the office, more calmly now. Once you accept the end of a particular time in your life, the past starts to slip away rapidly, even if nothing new appears in its place. Just as I had decided one day that I was going to leave KL, I knew then that my years of working at the farm were over. No drama. I’d ask Jezmine to find me a job, and if she didn’t I’d find something on my own, just as I always had. I’d find a way of telling Jenny, but only after I found something new. I wouldn’t tell her I’d screwed up and got sacked, I’d say I wanted a change. I’d figured everything out by the time I reached the office – that was how clear my thinking was, now that I had made my decision. After I left the farm that evening I would never come back to it. I’d leave it to rot.

  I’d just walked into the office when my phone rang. I’d replaced it in its pouch, clipped to my belt; its vibrations felt stronger than usual, or maybe it was the heat of the day, rising with the midday sun, or the sudden quiet of the office after the noise of the water pumps outdoors. I’d been so resolute in my decision to move on that it took me a few moments to register that it was Keong ringing. The number flashed on the little square screen, but I didn’t instantly recognise it, even though I’d dialled it just a few minutes before.

  ‘Please answer that before it drives me insane,’ Jezmine said, looking at a piece of paper as she typed on her keyboard.

  ‘Hey, little brother!’ Keong’s voice was even louder than usual. In the background I heard metal clanging and people shouting in a foreign language I couldn’t quite make out. Some laughter. Then a sharp grinding noise that briefly drowned out Keong’s voice. ‘You called me? I’m in a processing plant. The bastards are –’

  ‘What? Where are you?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said, shouting now. ‘In –’

  ‘Keong,’ I said, trying to imitate Jezmine’s professional phone voice, ‘I rang because I wanted to ask if you could help. I mean – not me, the farm. My employer has a slight problem. I mean, not a problem, just a … situation.’

  Jezmine was typing a document, glancing between her papers and the computer screen, but I knew she was listening intently.

  ‘Situation? What the fuck does that mean?’ Keong laughed.

  ‘I mean, it’s a situation that requires a professional solution.’

  ‘Wait, I can’t hear you, hang on.’ He walked away from the noise, holding the phone to his ear all the time, so I could hear his breathing, heavy and troubled in the heat. ‘Yeah, what’s the problem?’

  I looked at Jezmine. ‘We have a manpower issue.’

  ‘Manpower issue. What the fuck you talking about? Manpower issue my ass.’

  ‘We have a labour shortage,’ I said. ‘The situation is quite, umm, urgent.’

  ‘Your hotshot boss with all his business in Singapore, he doesn’t have any friends meh?’

  I went outside. ‘Keong,’ I said, holding the phone tight to my ear and lowering my voice. ‘I need you to help me.’

  There was a pause, and when he spoke again his voice had changed, no longer cut with his rough laughter. I heard some rustling, the metal clink of his lighter.

  ‘I need some workers. Fast. Men capable of heavy labour. Construction guys who know what they’re doing. A big job. I can pay them a decent wage but I need them quickly. Can you help or not?’

  He exhaled slowly, and I could imagine his face, the way his eyes narrowed as he blew out the cigarette smoke. As if life was hazy and somewhat beautiful. ‘Don’t worry about salaries, it won’t cost you much.’

  ‘So you can help?’

  Another pause, long enough to make me think that I’d misunderstood, or that he was going to change his mind.

  ‘You can always count on me. You have a problem, you can just call Ah Keong. You know that.’

  ‘Sorry to trouble you with this,’ I said. I was standing in the middle of the yard, and the sun was so bright I had to shield my eyes, even though I wasn’t looking at anything in particular. ‘It’s just that I’m in a really tricky situation.’

  ‘If you can’t rely on your old childhood friends, who can you rely on? We’re more or less brothers. We have to help each other out, don’t we?’

  Back at the office, Jezmine was texting someone. She spoke to me the moment I walked in, but didn’t look up. ‘Wah, your friend always talks so loudly? You’re just on the other end of the phone, he doesn’t need to project his voice all the way from the other side of the country for you to hear.’

  ‘Just finish your text. I’ll talk to you when you’re done.’

  ‘I can do two things at once.’

  I tried to deliver the news as casually as possible, as if the outcome had been as predictable as daybreak. ‘I’m getting the workers. It’s done.’

  She lowered her phone and stared at me. ‘You’re kidding.’

  I smiled and pretended to look through some papers, as if searching for an important piece of information. ‘If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem.’

  My phone pinged, twice, signalling new messages, which I knew even before I looked at them would be from Keong.

  Meet me tomorrow Problem solved

  Brothers help each other

  Every time we meet I watch her looking through her papers. Some of them are loose, kept neatly in a folder. She also has a ring file where she keeps them in separate sections marked by coloured dividers. Most of the papers are typed sheets, mainly in English and Malay, but there are news clippings too, a lot of them from the Chinese press. She also has many sheets in her own handwriting, and sometimes as I’m talking she’ll scribble something down, very quickly in perfectly neat lines, the tip of the pen running lightly over the paper. I could never write like that.r />
  I know that all these papers and notes are about me.

  I pretend that I’m not watching her. That I’m not interested in what she’s writing. But most of the time, when her head is inclined and she’s concentrating on reading or writing, I’m trying to read what is on the papers. I can never make anything out clearly. She’s just a bit too far away from me. Whenever we pause for one of us to go to the bathroom or the kitchen, she closes her notebooks and files, even if we’re only taking a two-minute break. She doesn’t want me to see what’s inside.

  Wah, you’ve got so many papers. You typed them all yourself? I said one day.

  Not so many. It’s kinda normal when you do a research project.

  What’s written down in all those notebooks?

  Oh, just bits and pieces. Wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. It wouldn’t be interesting to you.

  This morning she was writing something and drawing diagrams on a large sheet of paper while I talked. I wanted to see what she was doing, but every time I looked my voice faltered and I lost concentration on what I was saying. She’d look up, and I’d have to pretend I wasn’t observing her. A research project. I wondered how I would appear in her project, whether I would be a nicer version of myself. Or a worse one.

  Just before midday, she looks at her phone. So sorry, she says. I really hate to do this, but I really have to call my mother. She’s got a hospital appointment later today and I have to make some arrangements. I won’t be long.

  She goes to the kitchen and disappears from view, but I can hear her conversation. I wait for a few moments before reaching across for the notebook closest to me. I open it without hesitating and begin to read.

  December 12th

  Keong was waiting for me just off the Meru highway, at exactly the spot he’d described – a layby in front of a small row of shops. He was sitting in his car with the door open, smoking a cigarette and eating, dipping his hand into a large packet of prawn snacks that he’d set on the dashboard. I saw him from the other side of the road, while I was at the junction waiting to make a U-turn – one foot hanging out of the car, tapping on the grassy kerb, lifting his chin to blow out smoke the way people did in all those Hong Kong gangster movies we used to watch back in the nineties. There was a slowness to his movements, an impression of leisure, as if he could have hung around on that dusty stretch of road for hours, the way teenagers do. He got out of the car when he saw me pulling into the space in front of him, flicked his cigarette into the dirt, emptied the remains of the packet of prawn crackers into his hand and shoved them into his mouth.

  ‘You shouldn’t eat that rubbish,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care, my body’s already fucked.’ He wiped his hands on his jeans and opened the passenger door of my car. ‘We’re going to take your car. My air-con doesn’t work.’

  We drove northwards, then cut inland into the heart of the plantations, where the roads were long and narrow and straight, and mostly empty, except for the lorries that carried the loads of palm-oil seeds to the factories for processing. On either side of the road the view was the same, the palm trees deepening into a shade so dense and resolute that it seemed to last infinitely, as if on the other side lay not just the east–west highway or Pahang, but Russia or Alaska, or the seventh ring of Saturn. Once a contractor who came to the farm showed us maps of the area, and some photos taken from a helicopter. Away from the sea and the narrow, irregular strip of human habitation along the coast there was nothing but a flawless, flat green carpet of plantations stretching as far as you could see, with not even the smallest patch of forest to break up the uniformity of the land. Plantation after plantation, each one the size of Singapore, or Luxembourg. ‘Actually, Luxembourg is much bigger than Singapore,’ Jezmine had said. ‘I think you mean Liechtenstein. Or Andorra. Someplace like that.’ I never figured out how she knew such things.

  ‘This whole damn area all looks the same to me,’ Keong said. ‘Gives me the creeps. If you wanted to kill someone all you’d need to do is send him for a walk in there, tell him there’s a shack that sells stolen brandy or something. Poor fucker would walk around in circles for days before dying. Fuck. That’s why I always hated living here. Messes my head up.’

  He was right, in a way, and that was why he needed me with him. If you wanted to find your way around without driving in a huge loop you had to know how to read the differences in the landscape – the way the palm trees were of a slightly different age and height, how some estates were older or newer, the way the roads faced the sun in varying ways, the villages that were each different, or maybe the small surau or Hindu temple that lay obscured by the trees – a tiny landmark that you could easily drive past unless you knew it was there. All these things told you how far you’d gone, whether you’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, how much time you had left to your destination. This was before GPS, remember – or maybe it already existed, but only very rich people could afford to have it in their cars. Nowadays even my neighbours round here look at their phones just to drive into the city or other places they’ve been to a hundred times. It’s because the roads change so fast, they say, but that’s not the reason. It’s because we change so fast. No one wants to risk getting lost any more. No one has any time to lose. But I’m sure that out there, not so many miles away, when you’re on those small roads, your phone won’t be able to tell you the way. Don’t think Google cares about Sabak Bernam or Kuala Selangor.

  ‘You really have to be a local to know your way round these parts,’ Keong said. ‘Thank goodness you’re here. I’d have driven halfway to Taiping by now.’

  We were looking for an estate whose name meant something to me. I had a feeling I’d driven past it a couple of times a number of years ago, when Mr Lai and I had to take a few trips up that way to buy some cheap weedkiller and netting, in the days when we were just getting started and no one would deliver goods to us because we didn’t order enough. He would cut the deals himself with an old man to whom he spoke Hakka to get a good price – he couldn’t really speak the dialect, but he’d learned enough from his mother to be able to make decent connections when he needed to. He couldn’t even afford to hire a foreign worker back then, so I would go along to load the small lorry we owned, carrying the sacks to the edge of the open platform at the back before climbing up onto it and hauling everything into place. I’m talking fifteen years ago at least, more maybe, and I was stronger then. Wah, you’re really made for this! Mr Lai would say as he watched me pack the goods tightly onto the back of the lorry, and he wasn’t wrong: my body took easily to that kind of work, whether due to the genes I inherited from my parents or to the years I spent working on the farm. But nothing ever remains the same, not even a labourer’s genes. Only a few years later I would lose the ability to work like that. I got married, got promoted, my body forgot what it was like to toil in the sun and rain. But on those long slow drives back to the farm, cutting through the plantations and stretches of forest, the small bridges that wriggled their way across the flat land, I didn’t question my body, and my body didn’t question what I asked of it. I used to hang an arm out of the window, holding the steering wheel with one hand, never wondering what would happen to me in later years – never believing that I would ever be anything other than twenty-three years old.

  At that point in my life everything seemed new and slightly wondrous to me. My years of stop-start work in dead-end jobs in KL had come to an end, I’d had steady employment for over a year, and more lay ahead of me. I remembered every detail of those days – Mr Lai falling asleep in the passenger seat with his mouth open, a trail of saliva tracing its way down the side of his cheek. The clutch that stuck and screeched loudly every time I changed from second to third. The way the leaves of the palm trees turned silver-grey rather than green in the lowering sun late in the afternoon. The broken-down attap huts set back from the road, whose dried-foliage roofs had blown away in the previous year’s storms – things that had always been in my life, so constant
that they became invisible by their permanence. They came into focus then, just for those few months – or years, I can’t remember exactly – before they faded away again.

  That was how I knew the name ‘Golden Land’, the general location of the plantation, the quickest way to get there. ‘You sure you know?’ Keong said as we drove along slowly, stuck behind a lorry that held up the traffic. ‘When was the last time you went there?’

  I shrugged. ‘Before you were born, so just shut up.’

  He laughed and leaned his head back, as if he was going to sleep, but he kept talking, continuously and without need for any response from me. He had a really rough time when he lived down in these parts, he said. When he lived in the village. Everyone hated him. Even his mother disliked him – she disliked him for being disliked. Why can’t you get along with people? she used to say. Why can’t you be friendlier to people? We’re outsiders, we come to this place, we have to behave properly or no one will accept us. Be gentle in your manner. Be polite. If the other boys insult you, just walk away. If they beat you, just run away. What the fuck. Single mother with a teenage son, you think she was ever going to be accepted? All that time spent cooking and sewing for other people in the village, cleaning their houses, often not even getting paid – it made no difference, they still looked down on her. Imagine, people in a shithole like that, looking down on her. Sometimes he used to fantasise about going around the village at night dousing all the houses with petrol when everyone was asleep, then setting the whole damn place on fire. Of course he never did. Petrol was too expensive! Anyway, too late to regret that now. He didn’t fit in, and that was the end of it. Thank God I was there. I, Lee Hock Lye – Jayden Lee Hock Lye, wahlau! – was the one who kept him sane. And yet his mother had told him, more than once, not to hang out with me. She liked me, but didn’t want him spending time with me.