For the longest time I wanted to write a story about a disappearance:
In the next passage Ling Toong imagines herself from the perspective of a ‘night mover’ who helped to stage someone’s ‘evaporation’:
Once I helped her disappear, she disappeared from me too. I no longer know if she exists, I know she existed, but even that knowledge becomes a bit imagined, with nothing to echo back to me what I saw. She did come to me and ask for my help:
Im so cautious. Every moment—speech act gesture—creates a new memory and he remembers everything: ‘You were pretty worked up about it and called them such cunts remember’ ‘I remember him pouring his heart out while you scratched your arse and laughed’ ‘You seem so much happier now’ I cant bear to rack up more witnessed behaviour, have memories housed and tended to some place beyond my grasp and knowing. What do they look like? Do they have brothers and sisters? How old are they and do they weigh a lot? See, not knowing where to even begin this unfathomable search, im left with a sickening, defeating sense of pragmatism. Once I tried to keep one. She was just a wee thing, jumping on me and making me laugh the whole day. The next day she was gone, Im quite sure he took her—judging by the look on his face—to that place from where she might come out one day, but whats the difference when I know I wont recognise her. I may not love her anymore. Already Ive forgotten what or how she did. All I can think about is what he does with her.
I instinctively knew what to do, muscle memory I suppose, to cover the same familiar ground that helped other memories disappear. As a child I remembered too much and hurt all the time because of it. A friend once asked me to meet him; I held on to that promise so tightly, and when the day finally came he didn’t call or show up. I waited for hours insisting he must’ve been late, I must’ve had the wrong place or date. It would be ridiculous to call; he knew what we agreed on. The next day I waited again. I walked around for weeks burdened with disappointment, thinking it was over. He came to me later, cheerily, ‘How’ve you been?’ I looked at him aghast. Like it didn’t happen. I began to doubt my own life, my own grievances. I instinctively knew what to do. I had to learn to listen and remember and feel loosely, I had to learn to make details seep through the cracks. I became better than most, I would forget things that others insisted had happened, I was in command. No, that didn’t happen – oh, that? You remember that? That’s weird – you must be mistaken. Yeah, let’s say it might’ve happened, I doubt it though. I could be anything, and when she came to me, I knew I could help her become anything, instinctively salting the earth behind her wherever she went.
Do they have brothers and sisters? How old are they and do they weigh a lot?
With fragments of messages rolled into rice-sized grains, camouflaged and tucked tightly into straw hats, children assembled at secret locations to re-member pieces of broken code. The reward was a teacup of rice for the whole family. Once, they didn’t eat for a whole week. A paper certificate testified to their participation in the national effort. Later, the Communists gave everyone with a certificate a house. They didn’t know they had to get a certificate, they weren’t given one, they didn’t keep it. Who survived that could testify, how could they prove, what kind of (material) evidence would suffice.
They narrate all this, untouched by the memory, except the hunger. A listing of incontrovertible unavoidable happenings and actions as factual as a farmer’s almanac.
It only appears strewn.
There are rice-sized fragments of facts that do not survive the war.
Once my father brought home a durian in a bag. You could tell it was a durian from the spikes breaking little dark stars in the plastic. I don’t remember his expression but I’d like to write: once my father came home smiling and as he bent down to scoop us up, his light blue tie dipped vividly into and off the ground like spilling water in reverse, and from the safety of his right shoulder I breathed in the smell of sundrenched cotton. Looking at the heavy round bag resting by the kitchen cabinet door, I couldn’t get a football out of my mind. I took a running start from the living room. Once you kick a durian, you can hardly think of anything else. You are welter of dark stars streaming blood right leg. No body, no mind.
One day my father took me to Genting Highlands in Malaysia, the first temperate place I’d ever been, to pick strawberries. High up in the misty hills, clad in our windbreakers, I felt the melancholic brush of a whole other life that had existed without my knowing. Was this nostalgia? I don’t remember picking one strawberry. I don’t remember there being any at all. We stayed in a bungalow that used to be a holiday home for the British. Genting Highlands is the local gambling destination for daytrip aunties – busloads of Cinderellas, scratchers, thumpers – in luminous visors and tiger print, rhinestone bejewelled tees, and fanny packs stuffed with ginger sweets for car sickness, some smelly salty snack of dehydrated animal, white flower oil to be rubbed on temples, plastic nail file, nail polish to be whipped out while waiting in line at customs …
Édouard Levé said when he looked at a strawberry (Catherine Lim said she wrote about strawberries long before (When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes visited Marianne Moore, she fed them strawberries (In fairytales, strawberries are the popular choice of fruit the orphan has to conjure up out of season to feed her stepmother. Divine intervention occurs in the woods to satisfy (Iago convinces Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity by describing the strawberries embroidered on her handkerchief. (Strawberries are among the mise en scene of ‘ranunculus – Crowfoot, the grassy-leaved Rabbit-toothed white flower (The strawberry is among the most frequently used symbols in English domestic embroidery of the 16th and 17th centuries; ‘wherever the needle (In 18–, the Hainanese are the last of the South Sea Chinese to emigrate to Singapore.
Entering a new country bustling with trade, with most occupations at capacity, Hainanese people become cooks. They learn to make cakes for the British. They make buttercream, a local fresh cream substitute which keeps in the tropical heat.) could penetrate,’ as Rosemary Freedman tells us, motifs, carefully selected from books, were always an opportunity for metaphorical expression.) Geranium – scentless violet, anemones two kinds, orchises, primroses’ when a distraught Dorothy Wordsworth laments W’s departure in May 1800.) How do we know of its emblematic significance? Scholars ask.) this demand. Divine strawberries are intoxicating. Tantalised, the stepmother ventures into the woods to personally guarantee the largest spoils.) and Sesame biscuits and milk. Later, recalling this hospitality, Plath commits passive aggressive vengeance against domesticity with lines like ‘Lemon tea and earwig biscuits – creepy-creepy. / You’d not want that’, harbouring her own choking death in the poem.) she ever tasted one. Once she wrote ironic stories about Singaporean life that weren’t particularly ironic, but because she called them Little Ironies, there was a vexatiously generative possibility that the lack of irony was ironic. Or was it.) he thought of a tongue. And when he licked it, of a kiss. And he could see why drops of water could be torture.
(Bits of anything can be torture.)
