by Tash Aw
‘Why?’
‘Because your family was too much like ours. A broken home.’
‘But she made dumplings for me. Steamed buns. Biscuits.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he replied, easing a cigarette out from its pack. He paused for a moment before lowering the window. The air that rushed around the car muffled his voice and I struggled to hear him. ‘I guess if you want to be respected, you have to hang out with people who are respectable. Rich ones. Normal ones. You don’t want to be associated with –’
A lorry went past, travelling in the opposite direction, drowning out what Keong was saying. I wasn’t interested in what he and his mother thought of us. We were normal, I thought. In that village, at least, we never stood out. I chose not to argue with him, I just let him carry on. It didn’t matter anyway, it was such a long time in the past; it had no bearing on the life I had now, no bearing on my future.
We were passing a convoy of lorries, strung out over a few miles – it must have been a time for harvesting the palm-oil seeds, because the trucks were heavy with the orange-brown fruit. The rumble of their engines as we passed them made it difficult for me to hear Keong clearly, and I was glad for this. I picked up the word sorry once, and perhaps a second time, and when we broke clear of the lorries I understood that he was apologising for having left KL so abruptly when we lived there as young men. Remember the friend of his that he used to mention, the one who was going to work in a hotel in Hong Kong? (No, in fact I didn’t remember.) He’d been asking Keong to go and join him over there. The salary was great, they’d rent a room together in Mongkok or somewhere further up in the New Territories, and they’d save up enough money to go back home in a few years’ time and set up their own business, a restaurant or something like that. In hindsight it was a stupid move, but when you’re young and in his position, even vague promises sound like concrete career plans.
He’d been having a lot of problems at the time. (Yes, I remembered that.) His head was muddled, he couldn’t think straight. He’d started taking some of the pills he’d been selling, and they screwed with his brains, exhausted him. (I suspected, oh I suspected, but I never knew for sure.) One week he would imagine living in a penthouse on the Peak in Hong Kong, the next week he saw himself lying down on the tarmac and dying in the middle of Chow Kit market. He’d stay awake for two, three nights in a row, then sleep for two or three days afterwards. He had no money, he was always in danger of getting into trouble – with the police, with the gangsters who hung around the same places he did. That’s why he woke up one day and thought, I have to leave. Now.
He used all his money to buy a cheap ticket to Hong Kong, but we all know how that story ends – right there, where it began. He landed in Hong Kong with his friend, but after two unsuccessful weeks of looking for a job, he had to come home. No one would take someone like him – no papers and no qualifications. Not even low-grade shops like those selling herbal remedies or school uniforms would accept him. He could have got a job washing dishes in a cheap restaurant, like his friend did, but if he wanted that sort of work, might as well do it at home. He still remembered the feeling he’d had, sitting in the departure lounge at the airport in Hong Kong and hearing that his flight home had been delayed. He’d thought that if he didn’t get on that plane within the next ten minutes, he was going to explode, he was going to smash the whole goddamn place to pieces, he was going to beat the hell out of whoever was making those announcements telling him he had to wait, longer and longer and longer, before he could go home. For the first time since he’d been a small child, he thought he was going to cry. The thought of returning to where he belonged made him tearful and weak, and he didn’t know if it was out of shame or relief. Then he did cry.
When he got back he thought of calling me, but didn’t, because he was embarrassed. What would he tell me? That he had gone away and failed? After just two weeks? He couldn’t do that. He knew I’d be upset with him for just disappearing on me (I hadn’t been angry, I’d thought: I’m glad); he couldn’t think of a way to explain why he’d been such an unreliable friend.
The experience sobered him up. On coming home, he started that course in computing that he’d always said he’d take, and it enabled him to get a job at a construction firm. That was when he started noticing the number of foreign workers in the country. Everywhere. One day he’d seen a team of men of all sorts of foreign nationalities fixing the wiring in the ceiling of an office block that was about to be completed. From a distance the men looked as if they were holding up the concrete above their heads, and Keong had thought: Without them, the whole damn building would collapse. In fact, take these workers away and the entire country would crumble. That was when he realised how much money there was to be made in bringing in workers from abroad. It didn’t take him long to find a job with a small company that did just that.
But he had felt bad. All those years, he’d wished he’d said a proper goodbye to me.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really care.’
He kept talking, and with the noise of the wind swirling through the open windows it took me a few moments to realise that he had moved on to another subject, changing his focus without warning, the way he always had. He was telling me about Bangladeshis. Did I know that the average Malaysian earned ten, fifteen times what the average Bangladeshi earned? That’s why there were so many of them here. If a Bangladeshi worker went to Singapore, he’d earn fifty times what he’d earn back home. Fifty times! Anyone would get in a boat and take some beatings if they thought they were going to earn that much money. But mostly they end up here, because in Singapore there are rules, permits, all that nonsense you can’t change. Try and bribe someone, you go straight to jail. No permit, no talk. But here it’s different. They can get in all sorts of different ways. There are people out there who help them enter the country, and once they’re here they can go to the mosque, eat halal food – it’s easier for them, so they settle for less pay.
We were on our way to find a group of them, Keong explained, some Bangladeshis who had recently arrived in the country. Eighteen of them, mostly men, though he wasn’t sure. With Bangladeshis it was rare to find any women in the group – unlike the shipments from Myanmar, where you’d often find women.
The shipments. He used the word in the way Mr Lai did when he talked about lorryloads of frozen fish travelling to the city, or the ground soy and corn that we used as feed. But when I glanced across at Keong I saw that he hadn’t noticed how strange the word sounded. He hadn’t meant anything unusual by it – a shipment was a shipment to him. It was just work.
These workers hadn’t yet been placed in a job, he explained, and were waiting to be assigned to their first contract, which Keong had lined up somewhere close by. That job wouldn’t be starting for another month, so he could lend them to me for two, three weeks – long enough to finish the construction work at the farm and save me from getting sacked. Then, if I thought the men worked well, he could fix it so that they stayed on the farm for the rest of their time in the country. Three years at least, and easily double that if I wanted.
‘I don’t need them for that long. Just enough for my men to take a break and recover from their illness.’
‘What do you pay your Indonesians?’
I told him.
‘You’d save 25, 30 per cent every month if you take my guys. Bangladeshis are so much cheaper. Think about it – your boss will build a whole fucking temple at your grandparents’ grave when he learns how much money you’re going to save him.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Huh? Why not?’
‘What would I do with my guys when they recover from their illness?’
‘Sack them, lor.’ He laughed, and started whistling a tune – the chorus to an old Anita Mui number that was so off-key I couldn’t recognise it at first. Then, as if remembering something, he said, ‘In fact, they’ve already sacked themselves. Put it this way. In any of those lousy jobs we worked at when we
were younger, what would have happened if you fell sick and didn’t turn up to work for a week?’
‘I never fell sick.’
‘But if you had, by the time you went back to work, your boss would have found someone new. What else would you expect them to do? You get sick, you get the sack.’
We were entering the area of the plantation, the trees on either side of the road lined up in perfect straight rows – taller now, obscuring the rise and fall of the land in the distance. Where was the low hill I remembered, with a telephone mast or electric pylon on it, a metal pillar of some sort? I started to wonder if my memory was as reliable as I’d thought, but then we saw a sign that announced the plantation. Keong said, ‘OK, now we have to find the north-eastern boundary. That’s where your men will be.’ He leaned forward and looked up at the sky, as if he could figure out our position relative to that of the sun – a feat that both of us knew he was incapable of. ‘Turn left at the next junction, probably.’
‘No, we turn right.’ I drove faster. I wanted to get there quickly, sort this mess out as soon as I could. I knew roughly how big the plantation was, and I worked out how long it would take us to get to our destination – only another ten minutes at most if I hurried. I’d worked out, too, what I’d do with Keong’s men. I’d keep them for a couple of weeks, max, maybe just one week or ten days, then I’d send them back to him, make an excuse that both of us would recognise as a weak pretext; but out of respect for an old friendship we’d pretend it was fine, and Keong would place them somewhere else, and I would never see them, or him, again. In the days they were with me, they’d accomplish little, but it would be enough for Mr Lai to see them at work – proof of my reliability and ingenuity. There would be no time for either party to form any attachments, for them or for me. The farm would be just another place of work to them, as familiar and alien as any other they’d worked at before. I knew that feeling from my younger days – remembered how it was to work somewhere just to survive. They would make sure they didn’t rely on the farm to provide them with anything more than a few days’ wages; they’d know it could end at any time. And so, when Hendro and the others came back, I’d simply call Keong and have the Bangladeshis sent away. There would be no drama in the whole affair.
I slowed as we approached the end of the estate, where the trees thinned out, allowing the sun to spread across the land and reflect on the surface of the marshy fields nearby. Keong checked a message on his phone. ‘This is the right place,’ he said. We cut our speed until we were going so slowly that we could see even the ripples in the pools of rainwater that had collected in the open ground, shrinking now in the midday sun. The plantation was behind us now, the landscape becoming ragged and untamed, with long grass and scrubby bushes before it ran into the next plantation, about half a mile ahead. When we reached it we doubled back, searching for signs of human dwellings, but there was no one around. We stopped the car and got out – still nothing. I began to wonder if Keong had made up the whole story, as I knew he’d fabricated things in the past. Bad shit that people had done to him. Fictitious enemies. Beautiful coincidences that he’d experienced. Places he’d visited. Nothing was beyond his imagination.
He checked his phone again, and made a call. ‘Fuck. No signal. Damn this place!’
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ I shouted. The words sounded sharper than I’d expected, or maybe it was just the sudden noise in the midst of all that silence. In the full heat of the day there was no sound – not even the rushing of the wind that accompanied the changing of the tides, or the noisy jungle insects anticipating nightfall. ‘I should’ve known better than to trust a loser like you with something important.’
‘Fuck you,’ Keong said as we got back in the car and I started to retrace our route. He kept pressing buttons on his phone, but the signal was too weak. ‘That guy who gave me the information, I’m going to beat him to death, I’m going to chop him to pieces.’ He repeated this a few times, but I wasn’t listening to anything he said. Hallo, hallo! he shouted into his phone, but the line wouldn’t connect.
‘Wait,’ I said. The sudden braking of the car startled Keong, and he fell silent abruptly. ‘Look there.’ I pointed to a spot in the distance, where the neat line of the plantation palms gave way to a messy tangle of shrubs and young trees. Keong lifted his sunglasses and squinted. ‘There,’ I said, but he still couldn’t see. A sheet of grey canvas, hanging from a tree trunk. Nearby, what appeared to be empty raffia sacks on the ground, dirty white mostly, though I thought I could make out a tiny patch of red.
‘What the fuck you looking at?’
I got out of the car and began to pick my way through the long scratchy grass, heading towards those old bits of cloth that hung unmoving in the shade of the trees. It wasn’t easy to make out exactly what they were, and at times, with the sun in my eyes, I thought they looked like carcasses, pieces of dead animals. When I was a child, I woke up one day to find the villagers agitated. Someone had lost a dog, one of those small thin mongrels that spent all day on the streets, and at night wandered around in packs that drifted into the forests to play or to hunt small animals or God knows what. The owner of this particular dog eventually found it dead, halfway up a tree, half eaten by a black panther. The other kids and I ran over to see its remains, but all we could see was a grey-white piece of skin dangling overhead. Any blood or flesh had turned black, and we couldn’t make out its face, or anything that identified it as the creature we once knew. We were frightened not by the death, or the savagery of the killing – we grew up by the sea, don’t forget, we’d seen worse – but by how easily a life could be scrubbed out without trace. Without any mourning, or sadness, or even realisation that it was now over. It looks like a dirty dress, one of the kids said as we walked away. We laughed, but we couldn’t stop thinking about the dog, and how it was now just a scrap of cloth.
It was that same feeling of dread that I experienced as I walked towards those pieces of canvas snagged in the branches ahead of me. A dirty dress. I tried to avoid the patches of ground that were soggy, but it wasn’t easy. Sometimes I’d step firmly onto what looked like a mound of grass only for it to give way to a pool of brown rainwater. Behind me, Keong was cursing loudly. Where was I going, what the hell did I want to see, why did he even agree to help me. He started running, splashing through puddles and cursing even more violently, and by the time I reached the thicket he had almost caught up with me.
We stood for a while and stared at the canvas tarpaulin. Close-up, we could see pieces of string hanging from its edges, clearly showing where it had been attached to other tree trunks, stretching it to make a shelter that seemed too low for an adult to stand up under, though maybe that was the point of it. String up a length of canvas at ceiling height and it’s obvious that it’s meant to shelter human beings. String it up two or three feet lower, below the line of the bushes, and no one notices it. The undergrowth had been cleared away, and the space was littered with plastic bags and wrappers, flattened by the rain into the ground and the foliage, but not yet bleached of their colour – they couldn’t have been there for more than a few days. Further away was a large mound of burnt sticks. When I nudged it with my foot, a layer of powdery white ash came loose at its base.
‘This is where they were,’ I said. ‘They’ve only moved recently.’
Keong walked around the small clearing, kicking at bits of rubbish on the ground. Bastard bastard bastard, he repeated. Cheating lying bastard.
‘Guess you were right,’ I said.
‘I’m going to mess that guy up so much.’ Keong was already making his way back to the car. ‘He’s going to regret ever double-crossing me.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy I mentioned,’ he said. ‘That black devil.’
Back at the car we took off our shoes and wet socks. I tried to wring them dry but the swampy water had got into them and made them smell bad, so I tossed them into the grass. Keong laid his on the roof of the car, hop
ing they’d dry in the fierce sun, but it was useless, and eventually he threw them away too. I drove barefoot, the pedals hard and gritty on my toes. Keong was silent, and I drove fast, surprising myself by how easily I slipped from one road into the next, always finding the smoothest route. As we got closer to town I said, ‘I guess we can forget about getting any workers for the farm.’ The moment I said it I regretted it, and expected Keong’s silence to erupt into another tantrum. But he remained quiet, and just stared straight ahead into the afternoon light that slanted directly into our eyes.
‘I’ll get them for you,’ he said. ‘But you have to help me. We need to find the guy who’s taken them.’
What strikes me are the lists. There are lists of everything. Often the most boring everyday details. Like:
* * *
Home décor: (use details in introduction??)
Calendar (Mei Fung Confectionery) from 2014. (November: pic of Guilin cliffs)
Chinese New Year scrolls, faded. (Sui sui ping an, wan shi ru yi.)
Danish butter cookie tin (empty?), rusting in places.
Crochet table mat, blue/red/yellow, torn top corner.
Lucky cat, arm not moving.
Rattan armchairs x2, string armchair
* * *
Or:
* * *
Fridge (Tuesday 3 December):
Preserved bean curd (for Hokkien congee)
Eggs x3
Gardenia bread loaf (half)
Tin of sardines, open, half-eaten
(Notes on DIET →→ rough skin, bad teeth)
* * *
I can’t figure out why she’s interested in this sort of detail, or how this is related to her research project.
December 15th & 16th