In 1999, at the age of nineteen, I won a national short story competition by writing about my parents’ unhappy marriage. I was the second-youngest winner ever in the history of the competition, a fact made much of by the Straits Times journalist who wrote about me. The prize was one thousand Singapore dollars and the publication of the story in the newspaper. I celebrated with friends outside, said nothing at home, and—on the day the article was published—made sure to hide the arts section. My parents said nothing about the missing newspaper section; they took little interest in cultural coverage. But someone found out anyway.
“I can’t believe you would write about something like that,” my sister said. She had called our house, it was pure luck that my mother happened to be out.
I only said: “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you bother pretending, you—you fraud. You liar. I can’t believe you’d sell us out like that. I just hope Ma and Pa never find out.”
She went on in that vein for a while more: I can’t believe it, I can’t believe that’s what you want to do with your degree, with your life. She referenced the deep pain I would cause our parents had they known about the story. Why would I sell them all out? Why couldn’t I shut up about things that should be private?
My sister was cruel, my sister was taunting, but most of all my sister was genuinely angry. Usually she presented a calm and quiet countenance to the world, and when she was angry with you she wouldn’t speak, but that day her voice got louder as she continued, whipping herself up into a flurry of anger. Her sentences fell apart and I could hear her panting breaths at the other end of the line, as if it cost her a considerable amount of exertion just to get the words out. These lacerating words were painful to hear, yes, but even though I was caught off-guard, her display of emotion unlocked some deeper animal core in me, one that reveled in pleased contempt about the response I had been able to provoke. She hadn’t spoken to me for six months, and when she did, off she went: the big explosion.
“Bullshit,” I said, when she paused for breath. I told her to shut her big fat mouth. I told her it was my right to think whatever thought I wanted, to write about anything I damn well pleased, it didn’t mean she could tell me off like she was a parent. Like I was a goddamn child! I told her if my behavior was so horrible, the person I was so rotten, then if she wanted to tell our parents what she knew, go ahead, and that I had no problem letting them know about my story, unlike she did, she who claimed to be all about protecting the family.
At that, she slammed the phone down viciously.
I said to myself: “Who says literature doesn’t have an impact?”
◆
I called my girlfriend C, with whom I’d been going out for nearly six months.
“You won’t believe what happened,” I said. I twiddled the curly phone cord between my fingers. I was lucky, my mother was out.
“What, babe?”
“My sister found out.”
There was a pause.
“About us?”
“No, and anyway I told you I think she knows already. I mean about my story.”
“Oh, no…”
“It was so classic. She doesn’t talk to me for months and months, and the next thing is—you loser, you fuck-up, how dare you?”
“I’m so sorry, baby. Do your parents know?”
“No, that’s one thing at least. She was so concerned about their precious feelings, there’s no way she’d tell them, like even if she really wanted to screw me over, she wouldn’t, because that would disrupt her image of herself as like… the saintly eldest daughter valiantly protecting our family’s image,” I finished bitterly.
“Well, okay. You’re right, that’s one less thing to worry about. Listen—do you think maybe she was hurt to read about herself like that?”
“What do you mean? It was fiction!”
“Sure, but you told me yourself it was autobiographical. Based on a real incident, you said.”
I paused for a while. Finally, I said coldly, “If she didn’t want to be written about in that way, she shouldn’t have behaved in a way that would make me write about it.”
“Would you write about me like that too, if we broke up?’
“What does that have to do with anything?!”
It was only the second argument we had ever had, and I came away from it angry and discomfited. For this, too, I blamed my sister.
◆
A few days after the phone call, C and I met up. Sitting by the fountain in a shopping center, we looked into each other’s eyes and talked intensely. It was a process that lasted three hours, and consisted of fervent back-and-forths about our feelings and what we had thought the other person’s feelings were, the difference between that and their actual feelings, and what we felt about those feelings.
Afterwards, to seal the deal, we had sex in the public toilets. The floors were clean, and I ate her out so well she clamped her thighs around my head and let out a thin, high wail so uncharacteristic it continued to sing in my blood, even as we wandered around afterward, thinking idly about getting wonton mee. There we were, miraculously at ease despite everything, despite our age, despite our circumstances.
C and I attended the same university. She had just come to Singapore from Malaysia, Ipoh to be exact. Home, for her, was crowded and noisy, a place where she spoke Cantonese with her parents and was the eldest of six children. Her parents ran a restaurant, and when C despaired over her schoolwork she’d swear she was going to drop out and go into the family business, which was what they really wanted her to do anyway. I continued to live at home, while she stayed in one of the university halls. This should have provided us with a modicum of privacy, but C refused to fuck in halls, citing the requirement to be in good standing conduct-wise. She was terrified of losing her scholarship. So instead we got used to fucking in public toilets. In the shiny new malls where you didn’t have to pay ten cents for admission and a tissue packet to use as toilet paper, we’d find relief standing up. Disabled toilets were the best, you could lock yourself in for maximum privacy. Sometimes, a sympathetic friend’s bedroom; when we had money, we’d go to Hotel 81 and eat frog porridge afterwards. It was mostly fine. It was only difficult because I wanted to touch her all the time.
As we walked around holding hands, C told me she was thinking about moving out next year. She would rent a flat, or a room in a flat, and split the rent with other students.
Is that what you want? I asked, my heart soaring guiltily. What it would mean to have that blessed thing, privacy, a room of our own!
Yeah, I think so, she said, squeezing my hand. Only thing I’m worried about is the money.
Money, money, money. Increasingly I was beginning to see that money—and the lack thereof—meant different things to different people. I stared around at the shopping mall, the looks on people’s faces, some self-satisfied, some seething. And their arms full of shopping bags. I was beginning to find these public spheres oppressive; they were increasingly where I conducted much of my life. We held hands, we kissed, we had long conversations. But it was only because we simply hadn’t anywhere to go.
Just then, as we were holding hands, a woman walked up to us and said, it’s so nice to see. I had barely begun to process this unexpected show of support from an unprepossessing stranger when the woman added, it’s wonderful to see sisters who are close. C laughed, but the incident put me in a horrible mood, one which was corrected only when I saw another pair of lesbians on the train, all arms draped loosely over shoulders, hands brushing against one another, a tableau which, on a normal day, would have made me ecstatic.
◆
We made the trek to campus to see our friend Rizi and caught her outside the library, where she hurried down the steps towards us. Rizi was scowling, although to be fair it was hard to tell when her face just looked like that and when she was genuinely aggrieved.
Today, genuinely aggrieved. “There you are,” she said, and immediately launched into a rant about the winner of some campus essay prize, this try-hard Sociology major writing toward the prompt: “What can we expect for Singapore in the new millennium?” Apparently, the answer—as propounded by the sad little Sociology major—had been: more of the same shit, basically. More roads and shopping centers, more one-party system, more globalization and free trade. (I had read the essay myself. It was the kind of essay that leaned heavily on the plain and useless words we had been taught at school: systems, technology, development. Words underneath which, I was beginning to suspect, lurked a kind of bland and inscrutable violence.) She broke off, eyeing me.
“Present company excepted… I guess.”
“Honestly, I don’t see why it should be.”
Rizi gave me a look of grim respect. C had told her about my sister. “How are things with your sister now?”
“We haven’t spoken since.”
“Ah, well, that’s how it is,” Rizi said. “Same shit, right? Government censors, family represses. But you know, I’m not surprised that your story won. It was kind of unthreatening, don’t you think? Bourgeois Chinese family politics, kitchen sink drama. No offense. But I see why the judges felt like they were able to pat you on the head and say good job and give you a little prize.”
C was upset. She tried to intervene. “Hey, you don’t have to talk like that—”
“Leave it,” I said, looking at Rizi. “She’s right.”
Like many of her other speeches, Rizi’s words created an instinctive uneasiness in me. Both Rizi and my sister seemed to bring something of the same disapproving eye to what I had done. It was hard to explain that I had felt myself come at the truth in the only way I could—slantwise. I knew what Rizi said wasn’t completely true, of course. I knew, was just beginning to learn, what the government did about art they didn’t like. It had been just five years since Josef Ng, when they had banned performance art, banned forum theater. But I also knew my story wasn’t like that, wasn’t bold or daring or revolutionary enough for the likes of Rizi. I had to admit it wasn’t like that at all. But another thought I had was: So you did read it. I felt triumphant.
◆
I grew up in a family that I, at the age of nineteen, had only just begun to realize was perfectly stereotypical: stern father, stay-at-home mother, and two children—girls—who embodied so perfectly the two girls pictured on the ‘Stop at Two’ posters so ubiquitous during the decade that my sister had been born. We could even have been those girls, had it not been for the large age gap between us, the only part of the tableau that seemed like an accident or rank carelessness, rather than the embodiment of the enlightened, the progressive, the natural result of gender-blind family planning.
And then there was the matter of where we lived: a semi-detached house in Bukit Timah, not the most fashionable part of that fashionable neighborhood, it was true, but affluent nonetheless. A membership to the nearby country club, where as a child I’d spent many a Saturday afternoon splashing in its aquamarine pool, buoyed by specially-purchased pink water wings. Two cars. And all of it on my father’s income. Every morning my father left for work in the larger car, the “family car,” his briefcase placed carefully on the backseat, and I saw nothing of him for the rest of the day (often he worked late, coming home only after it was my bedtime). The fact of his leaving never bothered me as much as my mother seemed to think it should; fathers left their families in the morning and returned only to leave again, that was a fact of life. It was taken for granted that family was of paramount importance. Friends, as my mother was fond of pronouncing, would come and go, but family was forevermore. The family was the bulwark against the other: minorities, gays, AIDS, low-class behavior, hot weather, illness, drugs, and smoking but not, I think in retrospect, favoritism, work, school, the government, and unhappiness. To all these things, family, which we had been taught in school was the basic unit of society (along with other national values on the inside front cover of our rough khaki-brown exercise books), remained curiously permeable, a porous membrane.
The year the incident I’d written about took place was a difficult one. I was nine, my sister was sixteen. My parents were often abstracted and unhappy that year. My father traveled frequently for work, but even when he was home, he was brusque with us children. He tried to shake it off from time to time, but the damage was done and we shied away from him, like dogs afraid of being hit. The frozen, hard look on my mother’s face never seemed to dissolve. Sitting in the backseat of the car as we went places, my sister and I would watch as our parents sniped at each other, then trailed off into silence as if they could, by mutual agreement, conceive of no better solution than to quit it.
That year, it seemed that people were always leaving. My father, for business trips abroad. My sister—the girl who, when I was three, had found me crying after boys in the neighborhood had flicked bits of screwed up paper at me, run over and held me and told me fiercely, you must never let the bullies see that they’ve upset you, because then they’ve won—had long since disappeared into enigmatic adolescence, flexing her sophisticated teenage freedoms: “Where are you going?” “Out.” “With who?” “With my friends.” “When will you be back?” “Later.” My mother would normally have been firmer about such backchat, her constant refrain being there is no such thing as privacy in this house, but that year she was distracted, weighed down by some fundamental loneliness that I longed to dispel. Instead, I spied on her as she spoke on the telephone. She would sit by the landline, her eternal weariness only alleviated as she spoke on the phone with her friends, she talked, she laughed, while I hung about in plain sight pretending to read a storybook while following along keenly with her phone chatter.
These conversations were never too edifying. Discussions of the various shortcomings of their respective domestic workers, where to lunch next. Sometimes, folksy aphorisms that dressed up a worldview that seemed, in retrospect, bleak and resigned: I have always believed that fate is predestined. I always say, if you can’t make yourself happy no one can make you happy.
More informative were the monologues she would engage in while driving me back and forth between school, piano lessons, and other extracurriculars. During these drives she would muse, as if speaking to herself, Your father has many flaws that I dislike, sometimes I can’t stand him, but at least he respects me. He has a bad temper, but he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t gamble, and he respects me. This respect was a mantle my mother didn’t wear lightly. There were the uncles who treated the aunts worse. There were the numerous petty inconveniences they seemed not to scruple to subject their wives to, there were the adulteries, and in one case there were—my mother’s eyes shone with angry tears as she told my sister this, not realizing I was in the room—the beatings. There were the uncles and aunties who were better too, of course. But then, none of them, better or worse, had scaled the heights as effectively as my parents had, the successful university-educated children of illiterate parents, none of them lived such coolly aspirational lives.
At that age, I considered myself a detective. I wanted to know about the world, I wanted to know about people. I hung onto my mother’s every word, I listened at doors, I eavesdropped on telephone conversations. I said things to test people’s reactions, holding back only in my father’s stern presence. Gratuitous insults, et cetera. There were the horrible nicknames I had drawn from the yellowed paperbacks my sister had handed down to me, particularly egregious examples of juvenile American literature in which I found a very different model of family relations than the one I had been forcibly wedged into. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins. The teasing, horrid older brother. I think I thought that if I just said the words, all the rest would follow. My parents were too exhausted and embittered with one another to intervene. My sister, on her part, never said a word, even when I knew I must be hitting a sore spot (pizzaface when she had had to be brought to a dermatologist who refused to prescribe her the really strong medication, one which might have worked). The first time, she gave me a simple scorching look, the high of which was never matched by all the subsequent times she turned from me in perfect indifference. You see, she’d read those cruel books too.
◆
Whenever my sister went out, I turned to the frankly rather tawdry habit of snooping through her bedroom. This sleuthing didn’t go very far. There was the collection of Sweet Valley Highs I wasn’t allowed to read, and a bundle of notes from classmates past proffering commentary on teachers or saying things like “I’ll miss you next year Jojo!!!” But I was looking for a diary. I wanted to read about myself, to read an explanation of our family.
My sister didn’t seem to be a dedicated diarist, I supposed she could still have had one, secreted away in some inner bedroom recess unknown and inaccessible to me, but successive rounds of systematic ransacking rendered it increasingly unlikely. Still, I kept trying, from some instinct akin to that of a homing pigeon. Picture me, now: creeping into her bedroom after my afternoon shower, balanced precariously on her rolling desk chair as I hunt through the top shelves of her closet, digging for the shoebox stuffed with scraps of clues, the archival document that will pierce the heart of the enigma that was my sister’s true personality.
◆
One Friday night, we drove out, in the family car, to eat. A reservation must have fallen through, because we were wandering through the food court of a shopping mall looking for an empty table. It seemed impossible, crowds and crowds buzzed menacingly around us. My father must have been irate, I can’t remember what was said but I do remember my mother turned from him with deliberate indifference, she took me by the hand and said, come, let’s look across the food court. We hadn’t taken two steps when she stopped, stiffened, the bones on her face seemed to grow more rigid, the epidermis that sat flush on top more withered and translucent. I looked up at her fearfully and did not understand until the soundwaves arrived, coming in at a speed crawling in comparison to that of light, impeded by the ambient noise of the crowds, what had caused my mother’s face to undergo that horrid transmogrification. My father was shouting at her.
To shout at my mother in public was shocking. All of us understood this instinctively. It marked out my mother as a fool, an idiot; that she’d allow herself to be yoked to a tyrant, a bully, an embarrassment. A farce of a woman: the fact that she had been disrespected meant she’d never deserved that respect in the first place. She stood like a queen. I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I don’t remember if my mother said anything while my sister stood silently with my father, but I could see the whites in her eyes, running all the way around her irises, and the red streaks running through the whites, set in the vast and terrible plain of her face. We must have stood there for a long time. Finally, still holding onto my hand, my mother turned around and walked on.
My father and sister followed her at a distance, they trailed after us pathetically, while she walked, and walked, and walked. I kept looking behind at them and whispering, Ma, shouldn’t we slow down? It was as if she didn’t hear me; she didn’t slacken her pace but walked ahead as determinedly as when I would tell her I needed the bathroom and it was urgent. She only ceased to stride ahead when I tugged on her hand and whispered, Mummy, I’m hungry.
◆
When we got home that night, my mother packed a few things in a small suitcase, the suitcase that was normally designated for carry-on luggage during our holidays abroad, and left, though through it all my sister and I begged and pleaded and wept for her not to go. My father, standing tall and saying, his voice pitched a few octaves lower than a shout: She can do what she likes. Or I’ll leave.
My mother was gone for three days. During that time, we tiptoed around the house. My father paid us little attention, he drove us both to school as he had always done. He continued to watch the news during the evening. It fell to our helper, Yati, to cook our meals, which tasted different, and to chivvy me into the shower. I had always cried loudly and theatrically, but my mother’s disappearance had frightened me out of tears. Most of the time, my sister was also out of the house.
After three days, she came back. When she held me, I felt a tension in her body, a tension that seemed to have bedded down in the marrow of her bones.
I asked her: “Mummy, do you forgive Papa?”
“For what?”
“For what happened.”
“What happened?”
I was forced to spell it out, and I did this in a trembling voice. You… fought… he… he shouted at you… you were upset… you left. My mother looked at me coldly, as if I was a decision she had made some time ago and preferred not to think about any longer.
“Nothing happened. It never happened.”
I protested: what do you mean it never happened? I was there, we were all there, I remember it. Soon I became violently upset. I appealed to my sister for help.
There was a pause before my sister spoke. My mother stood, the tension vibrating in her body. My sister, holding her water glass, looking from me to our mother, frozen with indecision and another opaque emotion I couldn’t name.
Finally, she said: “What Ma says.”
◆
I took my sister’s perjury as a declaration of war. The next day, before my sister came home, I crept into her bedroom and ransacked it systematically. I had always searched with an eye toward remaining undetected. I had gone through all the obvious places: the bookshelf, the shoebox full of postcards. Under the bed, in the closet. Her room was a puzzle box I was determined to solve or die breaking.
I was about to give up when I spotted it. It was hardly the thick, leather-bound journal I had fancifully envisioned. Just a slim exercise book, one that had been stapled, not bound—so thin it fit seamlessly into the microscopic crevasse between the back of the wardrobe and the wall. With the aid of my bitten-down fingernails, and then a ruler, I pried the book out. I began to read.
At one point I entered a flow state, one of simple concentration. I forgot that my sister was coming home, I forgot to listen for sounds downstairs.
That was when I heard my name, said so softly I couldn’t hear it the first time. I looked up. My sister was in the doorway.
◆
My sister went to my mother. I wasn’t there, but I heard it all, hanging around outside the room.
Ma, she was in my room.
A long pause, then a groan. The sound of my mother knuckling her eyes.
What do you want me to do?
She was in my room.
Don’t make this any harder for me than it already is.
She can’t be in my room.
Doesn’t it ever occur to you that she wants to be closer to you?
I don’t want her there.
A considering silence, then a short sharp sound like a crack. Only when the sound of my sister’s hitching breath, h h h, came to my ears did I understand that my mother had slapped her.
I had barely enough time to contemplate this new iteration of our family misery—my mother had punished her? I didn’t want to be punished, but she had punished her and not me?—before my sister pushed out of the room, towering over me, her eyes red. She gave me a long look, then strode past without saying anything to me. That was the first, one of many spells, of her refusing to speak to me, of acting like I didn’t even exist.
◆
The years slid past uneasily, cycles repeated. My sister and I grew up, then left home, to varying degrees. My sister wanted to study psychology at university, but had been quickly and efficiently persuaded to switch to a sensible degree in finance and accounting. My father’s peremptory voice:
“For what? You’re not going to be a psychologist, are you?”
“Well, I was thinking…”
“Bullshit. Western quackery. And then you have to study for years and years to get qualified. For what? How much do psychologists earn?”
When my sister admitted she didn’t know, he told her she would instead study finance. As a sweetener, he paid for her to study abroad in Australia, where we visited her. I had to admit it was a nice city: the cold weather, the little shops and cafes. Although by that time (I tried to persuade myself) I no longer cared what she did, much less saw her as a model for the kind of person I wanted to be, I was disappointed when she graduated, started work at a local bank, and settled back in at home, as if she had never left.
When it was my turn to apply to university, I announced that I would read for an English degree. This caused a big fight at home. My father said he wouldn’t pay for an overseas education for such a worthless course. So be it, I said. The battle was long and protracted, but I emerged victorious. I was strong-willed and stubborn to my sister’s sweet, my parents were seven years older by that point, and if I had suffered from their being seven years more embittered, seven years more unhappy, they were also seven years more exhausted, and I sensed this instinctively, stuck my thumb on it and pressed home my advantage. I got a scholarship, I studied English at the National University of Singapore, and—since he wouldn’t pay—I lived at home, not in halls, continuing to subject my father to the sight of me. Luckily, around that time my sister announced her engagement. In the flurry of wedding preparations, the disappointments of their other child were forgotten, or at least glossed over. The wedding shoot, the hotel ballroom, the makeup artist. The outfit changes and little chocolate favors. A beautiful bride at the close of the nineties. Once during that time, as we were driving around in our parents’ car—some errand to do with fitting, I don’t remember what exactly—staring straight ahead and gripping the steering wheel, she tried to give me some advice.
My sister was not a natural speaker. Her words came out in a slow, reluctant tone, I don’t remember exactly what they were, except that it involved our parents getting older, and how they seemed to have mellowed, and what it meant to her to give them a little bit of happiness, for them to feel as if all the love and time and money they had poured into us was finally bearing fruit.
“So what are you saying, that I should run out and get married tomorrow?”
“You’re a very clever person, you should know what I mean.”
It was a stiletto of a statement, and I met it with a sledgehammer.
“What would you know,” I said, “you studied accounting.”
◆
After that, we didn’t speak again for six months. Not at mealtimes, not—after she moved out—over the phone, nothing, nada, a void worse than anger or hatred, the absence of emotion in her hard blank stare when she looked in my direction, never even at me, just over my head, not until she read my story, the story of our lives at home, in the national newspaper.
◆
When I was fifteen, I exchanged long letters with a friend from school. Even though we saw each other every day, letters were the medium with which we built up, then destroyed, our friendship. The specific reasons, they’re not important now. I still have them all, the letters she sent me, though of course by necessity they tell only half—her half—of the story. In her last dispatch she mused over the meaning of words, words in general and the words we had deployed against each other. Words, she said, meant things. She admitted she had been careless with her words, had arranged them to say beautiful things, to say striking things, without thinking very much about whether they were true or whether they had been kind. But, she concluded, words could destroy. They could be missile strikes, nuclear bombs, a simple twist of the knife. Words were dangerous. With them we had built a dream and battened down the dream and made it impossible to see around the walls of the confining dream, then finally torn it all down. She was disgusted at how she had allowed herself to be hurt, how careless she herself had been with causing hurt. For that, she concluded, she sincerely apologized. And for that reason she would no longer write to me.
It had taken me a long time to understand this. My family home had long been a palace of cold and brutal silences, of the icy atmosphere that ruled downstairs and the sweet lone relief of the bedroom respite. I was a child formed by these influences, hating these silences but hopelessly shaped by them. In my book, the short sharp shock of words—a whistling lash—was preferable to the repressive lacunae of silence, a prison built from the absence of things. It took me a long time to accept what I had done to my friend.
University helped. Only when I was set with a tap upon the rails of an undergraduate reading list, supplemented by the recommendations of older students who told me what books and films to read and watch, did I come to a new understanding of what people could be, how we could live our lives. I had always read voraciously, but my earlier pace was a dampened, slack thing compared to that first shining semester.
It was in that fevered spectacle that I met C and fell into bed with her as effortlessly as falling asleep, and so the words I fell in love with were inextricably entangled with this girl, who lived life on a straight track and so laughed when she was happy and cried when she was sad, an utter lack of embarrassment either way, and with the sex I was beginning to discover. Even the weight of things unsaid came to develop a shimmer as lost and lovely as the blacks and whites of film negatives. Voids: mouths, assholes, the endless tunnels of in between. Violet carnations and plums in golden vases.
The first time we kissed, the first time we had sex (both events took place on the same day, roughly thirty minutes apart), I was filled with a happiness so fierce and so complete, I thought I’d die. Walking the streets, wandering the city (old to me, new to her, but really, made new in love, and so new to me too), talking so hard, laughing, teasing, kissing over food and drink. Sugarcane juice, Camel peanuts and Gardenia cream buns. We’d go out dancing: limned in disco light, her hair shone like a bruise. Fevered nights gave way to languid days, a constant liquid in the chalice between my thighs. Pastels drenched in daylight, every second a frame in a film I wanted to go on living in forever. Overhead bridges lined thick with bougainvillea. How abundant their green leaves, how papery their petals, hot pink like a sunset on a particularly dramatic day. How fatal, their prickle-sharp thorns.
◆
We’d been dating for less than two weeks when I showed C my story, as I was gearing up to submit it. We were hanging out on the steps by the river in Clarke Quay—a sleepy affair, especially during the daytime. Her finely wrought features, carved as if in granite yet always possessing a levity, like that of sunlight, frowned in concentration as she read my story. She read slowly. She took puff after puff of her cigarette as she read, the tip flaring orange, hard, on each drag. The sleeves of her black T-shirt were rolled up. I thought she looked like James Dean.
Finally, she reached the end.
“Baby, I love it. You’re such a good writer.”
I had to give her many kisses for that, and was only slightly irritated when she said, “So your mother just straight up lied to your face?”
“What? It’s fiction.”
“So it never happened?”
It never happened was, in fact, the title of my story. I teetered on the edge of deliberation, decided that it would be too on the nose to claim that an incident whose vanishing had prompted me to write a whole story about how it had, in fact, really happened, had never happened.
“Yeah, okay, it did happen.”
She pushed me for details: the details that never made it off backstage. I answered her questions reluctantly, feeling that she had perhaps missed the point, that she was trying to look straight at something that, for me, could only be viewed sideways, around corners, through the aperture of a lens. I wished she had asked me more technical questions instead: this line break and that word choice and the key motif, why psychic void, why interstellar. I flushed, I stumbled, I repeated myself, I grew irritated and annoyed. She looked at me a long while.
“I know you think I don’t get it,” she said, holding my hand. “And maybe I don’t. But I love it.”
◆
In my story, only the concept of multiple universes, alternate and divergent, could explain the fact that everyone involved suddenly seemed to suffer from an amnesiac reality. A lapse had opened up in the space-time continuum and created the dense sucking pressure of a black hole, an interstellar void, the psychic void of memory. And so I created my own alternate endings and universes. The incident resolved in so many ways: nature abhors a vacuum, doesn’t it? A talked-out reconciliation, a divorce. A Greek chorus chiming in from the edges of the food court. Bright red blood spurting out on the floor of the shopping mall.
The only thing that remains to be said is that all those years ago, when I’d found my sister’s diary, I’d read through almost the entire volume. And—what? And nothing. In her belabored recounting of conversations with friends and notations of crushes on boys, there was nothing, nothing at all about us. It was an obliteration, a smoking nuclear wreck all the more gutting for how neat and bloodless it was.
And so, when it came time for me to write my story, I climbed down into the hole as surely as I had climbed down into love, the journey leaving unbroken lines of dirt under the furrows of my fingernails. In the pit, I built and invented, I played God, I created things out of whole cloth and I moved them around to give the impression that I could tell the future, I gave events a sense of wholeness and symmetry when, in fact, there could be none. I flung myself into this mad and furious labor only to be greeted by the words she had said to me before she slammed down the phone: That’s how you’ve always been, you’re destructive, you break things.
◆
That Sunday, my sister and her husband were coming over for lunch. It was a weekly event, one that would repeat and repeat until the inevitable heat death of the universe. I had once invited C to this lunch, unsuccessfully, on the pretext that she was my Malaysian friend with no family in the country and therefore had no access to home-cooked meals. C had turned up twenty minutes late. Later, she complained, or got as close to complaining as she ever did, that our house was very far from the bus stop. From halls, she’d had to take a bus, then the MRT, then another bus, then the benighted walk from bus stop to house. As she’d sweated ferociously in her seat at the table, I writhed with self-consciousness at our house, my parents’ obvious affluence. My sister’s gimlet eye had meanwhile fixed on C, who endeavored as best she could not to notice: I know who you really are.
My sister swept in at noon. The way she brushed past infuriated me.
“Bryan not here?” I said as obnoxiously as I could.
“He’ll be here later, he’s at the office.”
“Wah, so hardworking.”
She shot me a look of hatred so chemical and acrid it was practically indistinguishable from love. “Where’s C?”
This made my heart jump, but luckily, our parents were safely ensconced out of earshot. I gave her the middle finger.
She stepped close and gripped my shoulder tight, so tight I wanted to yelp and squirm out of her grasp like a goddamned little kid. “You’d better think about how you talk to me,” she murmured in my ear. “Or I’ll tell what I know, how about that.” She moved off swiftly, entering the kitchen. A burble of speech. Ma, I brought dessert. Thank you, thank you, put it in the fridge. Is there space? The sounds of things being moved around. And so on. I stood in the hallway, listening distantly, resenting the expression on my face because I knew I must look like I’d been slapped.
◆
All through lunch I ate very little, taking food on my plate and moving it around to make it look like I’d eaten. My sister served us all solicitously, she played the responsible eldest sibling, she acted as if she’d never threatened anyone, never pressed bruises into a person’s skin. All as I sat and seethed.
“I have some news,” I said abruptly as we were about done with lunch. They all looked at me expectantly. All except my sister.
“I wrote a short story,” I began, “and entered it in a national competition. And, well, it won first prize.” I sat back and watched their reactions begin to take shape.
“Congratulations!” my brother-in-law said enthusiastically.
My dad grunted.
“Very good, very good,” my mother said. “When can we read it?”
There was a pause.
For one long, excruciating moment my sister and I looked at each other. I had done it, I’d pulled the pin from the grenade. I felt invincible, emptied of shame and secrets, I was nineteen, unmoored from the ineluctable logic of the nuclear family, the forceful gravity of the nation-state asserting itself: family is the basic unit of society. No longer the baby of the family.
You see, I had never been a very good baby.
I was a spy, I was a rebel, I was a writer.
Go ahead, I said to her silently. Do it, try to blackmail me now, just tell them what you know, tell them what my story is a container for, tell them I’ve been fucking a girl —my girlfriend!—and I’ll say yes I did, yes I am, I’ll say so many things none of you are prepared for, I’ll break this home with the truth and other luxuries we cannot afford.
I saw her delicate swallow in the way her throat moved up and down. “Actually, since Mei wanted to share, I thought we’d better share our news too. Ma, Pa—I’m pregnant. You’re going to be grandparents soon!”
Amongst the exclamations, the expressions of joyous surprise, the well-wishes, our eye contact was not broken. For what felt like long minutes—years—my sister continued to look at me. Her eyes, so like mine, were glittering and opaque. Her unreadable carbon-black regard so cold it scalded, the darkness of two black holes.
