December 1, 2011 Volume 2 No 2

  by Zen Cho

  To the women of my family.

  The house stood back from the road in an orchard. In the orchard, monitor lizards the length of a man’s arm stalked the branches of rambutan trees like tigers on the hunt. Behind the house was an abandoned rubber tree plantation, so proliferant with monkeys and leeches and spirits that it might as well have been a forest.

  Inside the house lived the dead.

  The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue. That was what happened–no poetry about it. She looked at a human boy one day and the creamy rank richness of durian filled her mouth. For a moment the ghost of its stench staggered on the edge of her teeth, and then it vanished.

  She had not tasted fruit since before the baby came. Since before she was dead.

  After school she went home and asked the aunts about it.

  “Ah Ma,” she said, “can you taste anything besides people?”

  It was evening–Ah Lee had had to stay late at school for marching drills–and the aunts were already cooking dinner. The scent of fried liver came from the wok wielded by Aunty Girl. It smelt exquisite, but where before the smell of fried garlic would have filled her mouth with saliva, now it was the liver that made Ah Lee’s post-death nose sit up and take interest. It would have smelt even better raw.

  “Har?” said Ah Ma, who was busy chopping ginger.

  “I mean,” said Ah Lee. “When you eat the ginger, can you taste it? Because I can’t. I can only taste people. Everything else got no taste. Like drinking water only.”

  Disapproval rose from the aunts and floated just above their heads like a mist. The aunts avoided discussing their undeceased state. It was felt to be an indelicate subject. It was like talking about your bowel movements, or other people’s adultery.

  “Why do you ask this kind of question?” said Ah Ma.

  “Better focus on your homework,” said Tua Kim.

  “I finished it already,” said Ah Lee. “But why do you put in all the spices when you cook, then? If it doesn’t make any difference?”

  “It makes a difference,” said Aunty Girl.

  “Why do you even cook the people?” said Ah Lee. “They’re nicest when they’re raw.”

  “Ah girl,” said Ah Ma, “you don’t talk like that, please. We are not animals. Even if we are not alive, we are still human. As long as we are human we will eat like civilised people, not dogs in the forest. If you want to know why, that is why.”

  There was a silence. The liver sizzled on the pan. Ah Ma diced more ginger than anyone would need, even if they could taste it.

  “Is that why Sa Ee Poh chops intestines and fries them in batter to make them look like yu char kuay?” asked Ah Lee.

  “I ate fried bread sticks for breakfast every morning in my life,” said Sa Ee Poh. “Just because I am like this, doesn’t mean I have to stop.”

  “Enough, enough,” said Ah Chor. As the oldest of the aunts, she had the most authority. “No need to talk about this kind of thing. Ah Lee, come pick the roots off these tauge and don’t talk so much.”

  The aunts had a horror of talking about death. In life this had been an understandable superstition, but it seemed peculiar to dislike the mention of death when you were dead.

  Ah Lee kept running into the wall of the aunts’ disapproval head first. They were a family who believed that there was a right way to do things, and consequently a right way to think. Ah Lee always seemed to be thinking wrong.

  She could see that as her caretakers the aunts had a right to determine where she went and what she did. But she objected to their attempts to change what she thought. After all, none of them had died before the age of fifty-five, while she was stuck at sixteen.

  “It’s okay if I don’t follow you a hundred percent,” she told them one day in exasperation. “It’s called a generation gap.”

  This came after Sa Ee Poh had spent half an hour marvelling over her capacity for disagreement. In Sa Ee Poh’s day, girls did not answer back. They listened to their elders, did their homework, came top in class, bought the groceries, washed the floor, and had enough time left over to learn to play the guzheng and volunteer for charity. When Sa Ee Poh had been a girl, she had positively delighted in submission. But children these days ….

  Once an aunt got hold of an observation she did not let go of it until she had crunched its bones and sucked the marrow out, and saved the bones to make soup with later.

  “Gap? What gap?” Sa Ee Poh said.

  “It’s a branded clothing,” said Aunty Girl. She was the cool aunt. “American shop. They sell jeans, very expensive.”

  The aunts surveyed Ah Lee with gentle disappointment.

  “Why do you care so much about brands?” said Ah Ma. “If you want clothes, Ah Ma can make clothes for you. Better than the clothes in the shop also.”

  So Ah Lee did not tell them about the boy. If the aunts could not handle her having thoughts, imagine how much worse they would be about her having feelings. Especially love–love, stealing into her life like a thief in the night, filling her dried out heart and plumping it out.

  Being a vampire was not so bad. It was like eating steak every day, but when steak was your favourite food in the world. It wasn’t anything like the books and movies, though. In books and movies it seemed quite romantic to be a vampire, but Ah Lee and her aunts were clearly the wrong sort of people for the ruffled shirt and velvet jacket style of vampirism.

  Undeath had not lent Ah Lee any mystical glamour. It had not imbued her with magical powers, gained her exotic new friends, or even done anything for her acne.

  In fact Ah Lee’s life had become more boring post-death than it had been pre-, because at least when she was alive she had had friends. Now she just had aunts. She still went to school, but she was advised against fraternising with her schoolfellows for obvious reasons.

  “Anyway, what is friends?” said the aunts. “Won’t last one. Only family will be there for you at the end of the day.”

  The sayings of aunts filled her head till they poked out of her ears and nostrils.

  Yet here came this boy one fine day, and suddenly her ears and nostrils were cleared. Her head was blown open. The sayings of the aunts fluttered away in the wind and dissolved with nothing to hold on to. Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.

  A classmate caught her staring at the boy the next day.

  “Eh, see something very nice, is it?” said the classmate, her voice heavy with innuendo. She might as well have added, “Hur hur hur.”

  Fortunately Ah Lee did not have quick social reflexes. Her face remained expressionless. She said contemplatively,

  “I can’t remember whether today is my turn to clean the window or not. Sorry, you say what ah? You think that guy looks very nice, is it?”

  The classmate retreated, embarrassed.

  “No lah, just joking only,” she said.

  “Who is that guy?” said Ah Lee, maintaining the facade of detachment. “Is he in our class? I never see him before.”

  “Blur lah you,” said the classmate. “That one is Ridzual. He’s new. He just move here from KL.”

  “He came to Lubuk Udang from KL?” said Ah Lee.

  “I know, right,” said the classmate. This seemed an eccentric move to them both. Everyone had uncles and aunts, cousins, older brothers and sisters who lived in KL. Only grandparents stayed in Lubuk Udang. In three years, Ah Lee knew, none of the people sitting around her in the classroom would still be living there. Lubuk Udang was a place you moved away from when you were still young enough to have something to move for.

  Fresh surprises awaited. The first time the boy opened his mouth in class, a strong Western accent came out. It said, “I don’t know” in answer to the obvious question the Add Maths teacher had posed him, but it made even that confession of ignorance sound glamorous.

  People said Ridzual had been at an international school in KL. The nearest international school to Lubuk Udang was in Penang, a whole state and Strait away.

  “He sounds like TV hor,” said the classmate. “Apparently he was born in US.”

  Ridzual called natrium “sodium” and kalium “potassium”. For the duration of his first week at school he wore dazzlingly white hi-top leather sneakers instead of the whitewashed canvas shoes everyone else wore. The shoes didn’t last long–they were really too cool to be regulation. But it didn’t matter that Ridzual had to give them up to the discipline teacher a week after he had started. The aroma of leather hung around him forever after, even when he was only wearing Bata like the rest of the class.

  Ah Lee had never been in love but she took to it like a natural despite her lack of practice. She spun secret fantasies about him: the things they would say to each other, the adventures they would have. She would reel off dazzling one-liners; he would gaze at her with intrigued longan seed eyes. She saw them sitting in a cafe unlike any kopitiam to be found in Lubuk Udang, with flowered wallpaper, tiny glossy mahogany tables, and brisk friendly waitresses who took your orders down in a little notebook and did not shout in the direction of the kitchen, “Milo O satu!”

  They would sit together at a table, Ridzual’s curly head bent close to her smooth one. They would speak of serious things, but she would also make him laugh. Through this love she would be renewed, brilliant, special.

  However lurid her fantasies got, her imagination never stretched beyond conversation. You could not imagine kissing a boy when you were never more than a room’s width away from an aunt. Ah Lee’s favourite time to dream was in that precious space of quiet between getting in bed and falling asleep. She could construct a pretty good Parisian cafe as she lay underneath her Donald Duck blanket. But cafes were one thing: kisses were another. No kiss could survive Ji Ee’s snores from the mattress across the room.

  It was no big deal. There was time enough to imagine the later stages of her romance–after all, she had not even got to the overtures. Ah Lee came from a family that believed in being prepared. While staring at the back of Ridzual’s lovely head in class, she wove conversation openers, from the casual to the calculatedly cool.

  She then made the fatal mistake of writing them down.

  The aunts would have pulled it off if they had left everything to Ji Ee. In life Ji Ee had played the violin. She could have been a professional if her husband had not become envious and depressed, so that she had had to stop playing to keep him happy. She had not touched a violin since, but she still had the soul of an artist. It gave her sensibility.

  She sat down next to Ah Lee one day and asked her what she was doing.

  Ah Lee was trying to think of nonchalant ways to ask Ridzual what life meant to him.

  “Bio homework,” she said. She snapped her exercise book shut.

  “Good, good,” said Ji Ee. She looked dreamily into the distance.

  They were sitting on the step outside the kitchen door. Behind them came the hiss and clang of Ah Chor making human stomach soup with bucketloads of pepper and coriander. In front of them stood the orchard.

  It was one of those blindingly sunny days: the leaves of the trees shone with reflected sunlight, so bright that if you looked at them purple-green shapes remained imprinted on your eyes after you looked away. The heat was relieved by an occasional breeze that lifted the leaves and touched their faces like a caress.

  A monitor lizard paused on the branch of a tree to look at them. It blinked and ran up the branch, out of sight.

  “When you are young, you must focus,” said Ji Ee. “You must pay attention at school, study hard and become clever. When you are young, that is when you have the best chance. And you are young now, in this modern day, when women can do everything. Can be doctor, can be lawyer. You know none of us went to university. Your Ah Chor wasn’t allowed and when Ah Ma and Sa Ee Poh were young, during the war, everything was too kelam-kabut. I wasn’t clever enough. Aunty Girl’s family couldn’t afford it, so she could only get a diploma.

  “But you, Ah Lee, you have all the opportunities. We have lived so long, we have saved enough money. Maybe if you study hard, if you get a scholarship, you could even go to England like my uncle the doctor, your Tua Tiao Kong. Your English is so good. You have a good chance.”

  Ah Lee was used to such pep talks. The aunts never scolded; they did not believe in raising their voice. They only “told”. The benefits of only ever being told and not scolded were obvious, but the disadvantage of it was that while people only scolded when you had done something wrong, aunts got to tell all the time.

  “I know, Ji Ee,” Ah Lee said. “You all have told me before.” In her daydream Ridzual had been on the point of tucking her hair behind her ear. She was impatient to return to it.

  “You must not get distracted by anything,” said Ji Ee. “There will be time for other things when you are older. There is so much time ahead of you. Right now you must focus on your studies. Then we can tell all the neighbours about our clever girl.”

  She put her soft hand on Ah Lee’s arm and stroked it. Love came up the arm and melted Ah Lee’s thorny teenaged heart. When Ji Ee said,

  “You’ll listen to Ji Ee, ya?”

  Ah Lee said pliantly, “Yes, Ji Ee.”

  So she never heard the rest of the talk, planned if Ah Lee had proved intransigent, which went into alarming detail about the inadvisability of youthful romance.

  The way Ji Ee had two-stepped around the subject matter, Ah Lee would never have known what she was talking about if not for everyone else. All the other aunts believed in the forthright approach, and not one of them could keep a secret.

  When Ah Lee came home from school the day after Ji Ee had given her little talk, Ah Chor looked up from the dining table and said,

  “Ah girl! Who is this Malay boy? What is he called already?” She turned to Ah Ma. “Ri–Li–Liwat or what?”

  Ah Ma did not know any dirty words, and could not have told you what sodomy was if you’d asked her. She said unconcernedly, “Ridzwan, Ma. He is called Ridzwan. Isn’t that right, Ah Lee?”

  “Cannot marry a Malay,” Ah Chor told Ah Lee. “They don’t know how to treat their women.”

  Ah Lee was surfing the waves of outrage. She started to say, “You all read my diary?” Then she clamped her mouth shut in fury. Of course they had. She could just picture Ji Ee and Aunty Girl reading it out, translating the English and Malay to Hokkien as they went along for the benefit of Ah Chor and Ah Ma and Sa Ee Poh, who could not read. The aunts’ conception of the right to privacy went far enough to allow you to close the toilet door when you were peeing, but no further.

  “Ah Ma saw you when you were being born,” Ah Ma said. No further explanation was required.

  “Even if you think you will be so happy and the man is so good, you don’t know what can happen,” said Ah Chor. “Do you know or not, they can marry four wives? Malay men …. ”

  “Si Gu had four wives. He wasn’t even Muslim,” said Aunty Girl.

  Ah Chor said repressively, “Your uncle was a very naughty boy.”

  “It wasn’t four wives, not four wives,” said Ah Ma. “Only one wife. The others were girlfriends only.”

  “The laksa lady cannot even count as girlfriend,” sniffed Sa Ee Poh. “Remember how she threw a bowl of laksa in his face when he told her he wasn’t going to marry her. Even a laksa lady can put on airs like that.”

  “She asked him to pay for it some more!” said Ah Ma. She realised they were enjoying reminiscing about her naughty brother’s adventures rather too much, and changed her face to look serious. “Ah Lee, this is what men are like.”

  “Not all men,” said Ji Ee.

  “Yes, all men,” said Sa Ee Poh.

  “Only bad men,” said Ah Ma. “But when you are young you cannot tell whether a man is a good man or a bad man yet. You are too small. Now you must focus on your studies. Don’t think about this Ridzwan.”

  “His name,” said Ah Lee, “is Ridzual.”

  She stormed out of the kitchen.

  From that day there was no respite for her. The aunts abounded in stories of bad men and the bad things they had done to good women.

  “Look at your great-grandfather,” said Aunty Girl.

  “Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said Ah Ma piously. “He was your grandfather, Ah Girl. You should show respect.”

  “No need to respect That Man,” said Ah Chor, who had been That Man’s wife.

  “This is what happens when you marry too young,” she told Ah Lee. “That Man didn’t even deserve to be called husband. I was only 19 when I had my third child, your Sa Ee Poh, and already he had a second wife.”

  “She lived in Ipoh,” Sa Ee Poh confirmed.

  “When I found out, I told him, if you don’t stop seeing her, I will take my children and go,” said Ah Chor. “He promised he wouldn’t see her again. But all along after that, little did I know he was going back and forth between me and that other woman! My fourth child is the same age as her second child. He didn’t know how to feel shame! Never mind my heart. At least if she didn’t have children nobody would know. But he didn’t even care enough to save my face.”

  Ah Ma was uncomfortable. “Ma, so long ago … it’s not good to speak bad of other people.”

  “Ah Lee must know so she won’t make the same mistake,” said Ah Chor. “He didn’t even support the second wife properly, so she came to me asking for money. When I saw her with the baby, I packed up and brought all my children here. Don’t think this was your grandfather’s house! He was rich before he lost it all in gambling, but this was my parents’ home. His creditors couldn’t touch this. All this was my land. If That Man came on it without my permission, I could call the police on him.”

 

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