And I thought, Of course hes changed. All those years in prison, when I went through phases of either sleeping all day and all night, or lying awake all day and all night phases that lasted weeks and broke down my sense of time, my resistance to the idea that every day should be different during that time, Keong was changing himself. Anyone could have become a new person in that period, anyone could have acquired a brand-new life. Hed been so proud of his hair, the long fringe that hed dyed a shade of coppery orange when he was fifteen, and that hed kept right up until that evening when we last saw each other. I used to joke with him. Hey, big brother, going to become father, still keep that gangster hairstyle meh? He called it blond, thought it made him look like a Hong Kong pop star. He always used to do this [sweeps hand theatrically over forehead, throws back his head in slightly camp fashion]. Made me laugh. Youre a nobody, just like the rest of us thats what I used to say to him every time he tried to show off.
That hair was gone now, trimmed short and allowed to go back to its natural colour. I hadnt seen him with black hair since we were teenagers. Hed put on weight, which made him look younger, not older, like an adolescent whod once been chubby but was starting to shed all his puppy fat and turn into a handsome man. I could tell that hed given up smoking, that he was eating better his complexion was smoother, the deep crease between his eyebrows which hed had since he was a child had disappeared. Ironed out by those three years.
At one point the lawyers started asking him questions about my character. Did he ever know me to be impulsive? Had he ever seen violent tendencies in me? Was I someone who felt sorry and regretted bad deeds? At first he answered clearly and simply, without hesitation, just like the serious businessman hed become. It wasnt a role he was performing, it was who he really was now. Both his English and his Malay had improved, and he used them carefully, considering every word before saying it. But as the questions continued, he began to feel at ease and started speaking more freely, sometimes using expressions you might consider rude. He even told a little story from our teenage years. One time hor, I steal biscuit from the store, I share with him but I steal so much we cannot finish, he say must return, must return, I say no way, poke your lung, but he lagi force me so next day we go give back biscuit. Your mother. Make me lose face! But he say how can steal, she also no money.
OK, OK, Mr Tan. I think that will do. When the lawyer said that I laughed. Even in his new life, Keong couldnt resist talking too much. For a few seconds, when he was recounting that incident which I couldnt recall I saw the years and the extra weight hed acquired fall away. I saw the skinny kid with a sharp face and earrings again, the one Id grown up with and had always thought would end up in jail. We even joked about it when he left KL to find work elsewhere. Dont worry about an address, Id told him, Ill just come looking for you in prison.
After the lawyers admonishment he fell silent once more a husband, a proper father, someone you could trust to hold a family together. Thats the image of him that comes to me from time to time these days. A respectable man, beyond hatred.
It was only much later that I realised Id only spent three years in jail. Three years thats nothing! Why did it feel so long when I was in my cell? And how did Keong change so quickly? Thats when I felt bitter. Id never held a grudge against him, not even for coming back to Klang and bringing Evil into my life. When I talked about it to members of the church some years later they said, You must forgive him the way God forgives you. And I thought, Theres nothing for me to forgive; I dont feel anything towards him. But when I saw him in the courtroom and thought of how quickly hed changed, I felt angry. He had taken hold of time and mastered it, I had let myself be crushed by it. It was only three years, I told myself, only three years you can make up that time and turn things round for yourself. But I knew I was no longer capable of changing my life. Evolution is a funny thing. For the longest time, you believe in the power of change in your ability to mould your life through even the smallest acts. Even buying a four-digit lottery ticket feels loaded with optimism, as if those five bucks might turn into a twenty-thousand bonanza and transform your life. Then one day it disappears, that blind devotion to hope, and you know that even if you pray all day, nothing will happen to you. My anger was directed at myself, I didnt blame Keong. Seeing him reminded me of the person I could no longer be.
As for the other man, his face remains a blank, even though it should be the one thing I remember from that night. In my defence, it was very dark when I first saw him. Whats more, he turned away from me before I picked up the piece of wood. I couldnt see his face when I struck him.
October 6th
Towards the end of the trial my lawyer tried to explain to the jury the kind of childhood I had experienced. She was young and clever, she worked for free, she wanted to help me. I understood that my life was being used as an excuse for many things. I listened to her speak about me, and though the facts were true, I felt as if she was describing someone else, someone who had grown up close to me, maybe in a village a couple of miles up the coast. Another guy who shared my name, which she kept repeating. Lee Hock Lye. Lee Hock Lye. Always my full name. Sometimes she said, Lee Hock Lye, also known as Jayden Lee, which made the name sound fake, as if Id made it up which I had. But still, it was my name had become my name. I had chosen it when Id found proper work and things were going well, just before I got married. It sounded good, people liked it they hadnt heard anything like it before. It was a cool name that looked professional on the calling cards that I had printed when business started going well. Jayden that was me, but each time she pronounced the name in front of the entire courtroom it felt as though she was referring to someone else, because she said it as two separate words. Jay, Den. As if she found it unnatural. Every time I heard it, I felt as though the name was being prised away from me, and that I never truly owned it. Also known as. I should never have taken that name, I was foolish to have chosen it.
The person she talked about was miserable, badly-educated, hopeless. Someone who had no choices in life. Anyone listening would have pitied him. A woman in the jury was nodding her head slowly, her face twisted in a frown. Even I nearly felt sorry for the person being described. But then I thought: Wait, this is wrong. I also thought: I was happy. I was normal. I knew my lawyer was trying to help me, but I wanted her to stop talking. I started humming a tune to block out the noise of her words. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine being back in the village as a child. I tried to remember what it was like to be myself again, but it was ridiculous. That life was gone. What a stupid thing to do, trying to recapture your childhood while youre being tried for killing someone. Recalling my life wouldnt make it any more real the truth of it existed in the version being described by my lawyer. I laughed at my own stupidity. I laughed quite loudly, and couldnt stop, so I had to put my face in my hands. The lawyer turned around to look at me. She stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and stared at me the kind of look you give someone when you think he might be having a heart attack but youre not yet sure whats happening. The judge said, I dont think the defendants life story is relevant. Please continue with your legal arguments. My lawyer tried to dispute this, but my laughing and the judges scolding made her lose her concentration; all the intelligence and conviction and vigour I had admired up to that point dissolved in that stuffy courtroom. It was very hot that day, the air-con wasnt working, I had trouble breathing. She stumbled over her words a couple of times, and couldnt hold her thoughts together. I was glad it was all going to end soon.
She got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. Maybe you can set things straight once and for all. Is your phone recording all this? I was born in Bagan Sungai Yu, not in Kuala Selangor town as all the court documents said. The two places are separated by a sharp curve in the Selangor river, and that small distance forty, fifty feet in places sometimes felt like an ocean between two continents. These days, with the bridges and good tarmac roads, people think of them as just one place: Kuala Selangor. I get the papers and read articles about new seafood restaurants built on jetties over the water, I see pictures of day-trippers from KL enjoying Sunday lunch, and I think: Thats not Kuala Selangor, thats my village. But thats the way things go: the big swallow up the small, everything becomes part of something else. Its just funny to think that when I was a child, even at primary school, we had to take the ferry over to town, or cycle miles to get around the bend in the river, and when we got to the other side, it felt so busy and important that I thought I was in Tokyo or New York. That map that youre looking at on your phone, it cant show you the real distance between our side of the river and town on the other.
My father was a fisherman, just like my grandfather before him. In fact, every man in the village was a fisherman. The country left us no choice the river coiled around the village, blocking our route south towards the towns, forever nudging us towards the sea. On the other side were the jungle and the plantations, which offered prospects even worse than the sea. Back then it was Indians who harvested the palm oil, now its Bangladeshis and Indonesians whoever was doing it, we only had to look at their lives to know that their fate was worse than the storms and tides and tangle of nets that we lived with every day.
All of us worked at the mercy of the elements the storms, floods, snakes, worms that burrow into your feet. Nature is beautiful when you look at it from afar, or from a car that passes through it with the windows rolled up. When you have to work outdoors it doesnt seem so beautiful. Yesterday I read an article on Facebook that said: We should all spend more time outside! I looked at the photos of people walking in parks, hugging, drinking water from small bottles, eating slices of watermelon. Lying down on the grass without a mat, without shielding their faces from the sun. Everyone was having fun, no one was sweating or getting heat exhaustion. There were all kinds of people in the photos. Asian, African, every colour under the sun but they were all behaving like white people. I mean, who else actually enjoys going out into the wilderness apart from these crazy angmoh? You get a day off work, you want to go out into the jungle? Those happy Westerners, they dont know what outdoors is like around here.
I remember once, when I was thirteen, fourteen old enough to have started feeling that if I didnt escape the village I would go mad I spent a whole day cycling as far as I could, in every direction I could think of. I went inland into the plantations in the shade of the palm-oil trees until the mud tracks got too soft for me to cycle. I looked ahead of me, thinking, How long would I have to cycle before I came out on the other side of the estate? I could only see the perfect rows of trees disappearing into the darkness, so I headed back to the coast, cycling along the dirt path that ran along the rocky shoreline, the red earth staining my toes. All the way to Sekinchan and beyond, that was all I could see: red earth, rocks and mud, the sea stretching back towards Indonesia, so flat and shallow, like a sheet of silver without end. No wind. No shade. The sun so hot on my head and arms that my skin felt stripped away with sandpaper. The light too sharp for my eyes the same light that Id known ever since I was a baby. I knew that all my days as an adult every single one, to the end of my time on this earth would be spent under that burning sun. In that moment, I suddenly got the feeling that all the things Id ever known my family, my home, the trees, grass, water, food, the bare earth, the huge, huge sea: everything were strange and foreign, as if Id never known them at all. They were mine, handed down to me at birth, the only heritage Id ever know, and yet at that moment they didnt seem to belong to me. This land that was supposed to be part of me, and I part of it in that instant we felt like strangers. I didnt want it. One day, it would kill me.
[Pause; long sigh.]
I like my life indoors now. If I had children I would make sure they never had to go outside, ever.
What made us different from the Indians who laboured in the plantations was that we worked for ourselves. If it rained we wouldnt eat. If the catch was plentiful we could save some money and replace our worn-out shoes, buy a tarpaulin to stretch over the front yard to keep the rain out of the house small things like that. The equation was simple for us. But they worked for the big corporations, the ones the government took over from the British. New owners, same rules. Times change but the workers lives never improve. They had bad pay, bad housing, no schools, had to work with poisonous chemicals all day, had no entertainment in the evenings other than to drink their home-made samsu that made them go blind and mad. But what else could they do? Run away to the city and live on the streets? At least back then they had papers. Now its all Bangla and Myanmar workers I dont think a single one of them has an ID card.
We seldom spoke about the Indians on the plantations, except to say how miserable their fate was. Poor black devils, dead but not dead repeating these kinds of expressions made us feel that by comparison we were comfortable and easy. We never mixed with them our lives were totally separate. We didnt want anything to do with them, in case their misfortune rubbed off on us. All the time I was growing up, I shared the villagers sense of being scared of the plantation Indians because they might infect us with their poverty, and we really didnt need any more of that in our lives. Maybe it was just another superstition that we Chinese specialise in you know, like: Dont look at a funeral procession or you might die too. Looking back now, I guess it was because they made us realise that we were not so different from them. So they just existed, a constant presence on the plantations over there, which is to say right next to us a reminder of how bad things could get.
I guess you could say it was Geographys fault that I was born into a family of fishermen that we became who we were. But history played its part too. Like most of the people in the village, three of my grandparents arrived from Indonesia in the first years of the Second World War, when it wasnt safe to be Chinese over there. Theyd heard about the internment camps, the summary executions, young girls being raped all the stuff Im sure youve studied at college. Even I heard about that in school. They knew it might be the same story here, but they took their chances. What makes a person leave a country for another country where they could be persecuted for exactly the same thing? You get on a boat in Sumatra, cross the Melaka Straits, knowing that you could get rounded up and put in a prison camp just like you were before. Why did they do it? Ill never know. Aiya, they made it through the war, were all OK now, why do you care? That was what my mother said when I asked her about my grandparents. Stuff that went on in the war forget it. Old Chinese folk never talk about that, so dont go asking.