I believe all is well with them.
I read about your familys business in the papers not that I was looking out for it or anything, I just read an article by chance. Things must be tough.
He shrugged. Its a global crisis, isnt it? Its tough for everyone though you seem to be doing pretty well.
A young woman appeared at his side and slid her hand around his waist, inviting him to do the same; but she was looking away from him, toward something behind Yinghuis back. There was a sudden burst of camera flashes around them, two or three photographers taking pictures of the couple. Yinghui stepped back and watched them strike poses as they faced the cameras he stiffly, his new companion sinuously and expertly. Yinghui recognized her from magazines shed read in the hairdressers a local actress on the verge of stardom. She certainly did not have style issues. From a distance they made a handsome couple, Yinghui thought, and she could already envisage the photos in the magazines: a perfect union of modern Chinese beauty and old overseas Chinese money. The lines of his drawn, tired face would not be visible, and the reader would see just his good cheekbones, his perfect bearing and casual elegance the sort of thing that could only have been produced by generations of good breeding.
He turned to look at Yinghui, mouthing the word, Sorry, and she mouthed back, No problem. She hung about for a while, wondering what to do. Should she slip away in a dignified manner without a proper goodbye or continue waiting for him, the feeling of being superfluous mounting with every second? She had almost decided on the former when she was suddenly seized by a need to talk to him to tell him things. She felt a rush of unaired grievances welling up in her chest, pushing up into her throat; the need to vocalize them took her by surprise, shocked her. She wanted to sit him down, face-to-face, and speak at him. She didnt need him to reply; she merely required him to be physically present while she said her piece. He could listen passively, unabsorbing, and she wouldnt care, but she needed to catch hold of him.
This was ridiculous, she thought, just ridiculous. It was nearly fifteen years ago what did it matter? She was an entirely different person now. The quick flash of irrational hatred that she felt for him began to subside. He was a few years older than she was, a man slipping surely into middle age; he had his own problems. She hadnt felt even the slightest bit of malicious pleasure when she read the financial press about his familys business going bust. She had felt entirely disinterested, her emotional detachment tinged with pity much as she was feeling now. Look at him, taking up with a trashy actress fifteen years younger than himself. It was sad. He was sad. Yinghui had barely known him in the first place.
Never let the past affect how you perform. Every day is a new day. That was something else shed said in that defining interview, so she ought to practice what she preached. She gathered herself to leave and, as she did so, dipped into her clutch bag for her business card she was a consummate professional, and this was a professional setting. She pushed through the crowd of people and handed it to him with both hands.
So sorry, but I have to rush off now. Good to see you again, a real surprise. Heres my card if ever you need to get in touch.
He accepted it with both hands, and she realized that the formality between them was entirely appropriate: They were strangers to each other now. Wonderful, he said, slipping the card into his pocket. Great. I will call you.
But she knew, as one always does in these situations, that he would not call her.
As she sat in bed that night, she allowed herself one minute to remember how Justin C. K. Lim and the rest of his family had looked all those years ago, how they had behaved.
Just one minute, and then she would put them out of her mind.
She checked her BlackBerry, replying to the emails that had come in earlier that day all the fascinating projects she was going to begin in the weeks, months, and years ahead.
HOW TO MANAGE TIME
When I was thirteen, I was sent away to live with relatives in the far south of Malaysia, at the opposite end of the country from where I had been born. Do not be alarmed this sort of displacement is quite normal among underprivileged rural families. My mother had died a few years earlier, and my father, unable to care for me properly, decided to ask my great-aunt to take me in. He had to move away from our village to seek work in Kota Bharu, where he lived in one room above a tire-repair shop. It made sense for him to be free of me.
My great-aunt lived and worked on a small pineapple farm about thirty miles north of Singapore. The peaty soil of the region was famous for producing the best pineapples in the country, but ours were an exception to the rule, being meager in size and acidic in taste. Nothing I did seemed to improve them not the addition of buffalo manure or even the chemical fertilizers I found on a lorry parked by the road one day (there was no one about and far too much fertilizer for any one person to use, so I helped myself). Even at that age I found the lack of a satisfactory solution very frustrating. Why couldnt I make those pineapples big and sweet? I worked on the farm every day after school it was my way of earning my keep and it kept me out of mischief, said my great-aunt. I do not have fond memories of this period, because it involved failure: the only failure I have encountered in my life thus far. To this day, even a brief encounter with hard unripe pineapple (of the kind one routinely encounters on airplanes) is enough to send me into quite a rage.
Life in the south was not a thing of beauty. It lacked the soul of the north, the wilderness, the poetry. It is surprising how ones childhood days can be troubled by the finer concerns of the spirit, filled as they are with the anxieties of youth. I was picked on at school, teased for my accent, which I was never fully able to lose the unconscious warping of as to es or os, the dropping of the ends of words, the addition of unfamiliar emphatic words. My speech marked me as foreign and, unsurprisingly, I became known as a quiet boy who said very little. I spent much time lurking in the background, so to speak, watching from the sidelines and never thrusting myself into the spotlight. By remaining in the shadows, I learned to observe the workings of the human spirit what people want and how they get it. Everything that I was to achieve later in life can be traced back to this period, when I began my apprenticeship in the art of survival.
All that earnest study of the cut and thrust of life meant that I did not have time to miss home at first. I did not suffer from any longing for my homeland in the north, with its strange, warm dialect and melancholy coastline scarred with brackish streams that ebbed and flowed with the tide. It is only now, when I have the luxury of time and rich personal accomplishment, that I can sit back and appreciate a certain sentiment for the village in which I grew up. This does not, however, mean that I am someone prone to nostalgia. I am certainly not encumbered by the past.
Like most people in our position, we lived an industrious but precarious existence. My great-aunt had worked part-time in a factory on the outskirts of Johor Baru that produced VHS players for export, but, being in her fifties, she was soon laid off and had no work other than to tend to our farm and we were therefore forced to be inventive in the way we made our living. Nowadays I hear liberal, educated people refer sympathetically to such ways of life as hard, or even desperate, but I prefer to think of it as creative. I had just turned thirteen and thought that if we had more money I would be able to return home.
I began to sell pineapples on a disused wooden stand by the side of the road that led to the coast, hoping to ensnare day-trippers from Singapore on their way to Desaru. Knowing that our pineapples were sour, I sold them cheaply, and in the first few weeks I managed to make a little money. But even this began to trickle away as people realized the low quality of my wares. So one day I bought a supersweet pineapple in the market and cut it up in pieces, offering it as proof of my own fruits tenderness. A number of people fell for it, and only one couple complained on their way back from the coast. I feigned innocence I couldnt guarantee that every pineapple would be sweet. They showed me a pineapple cut in half, and I recognized its dry pale flesh as one of mine. They insisted I give them five pineapples for free, and when I refused, the woman called me names and her companion ended up hurling the pineapple at my head. I ducked, but it caught me on my ear, making my ear swell like a mushroom. Soon afterward, I abandoned the stall and got a job waiting tables at a local coffee shop.
I did not see my father for nearly four years. I received news from him occasionally, when a letter would arrive via my great-aunt. He would talk about the Kelantan River bursting its banks in the monsoon season, the kiteflying contests that year, the secondhand scooter he had bought, things he had eaten in the market uninteresting news of daily life. Once he told me he had bought me a large spinning top, which awaited my return, but when I finally went home there was no further mention of it.
There was never any news of jobs or money the very reason we had to move away from home. There was no indication of how he was planning our future, no sense that he was aware of the passage of time. I had never been aware of this myself, but now, hundreds of miles from home, I could almost hear the seconds of an invisible clock ticking away in my head. I had gone to live with my great-aunt thinking that it was a temporary event and that I would soon be back home just until my father got settled. That is what he told me. After a year I realized that my residence in the dull flatlands of the south was not going to be as fleeting as I had hoped. One learns quickly at that age. Like all children, I had never before appreciated what time meant the years stretched infinitely beyond me, waiting, impossibly, to be filled. But all of a sudden I began to feel the urgency of each day. I counted them down, saddened by how much I could have been doing with every sunrise and sunset, if only I had been at home.
I waited for my father to think of a plan that would reunite us in our village, but, incapable of understanding that time was not on his side, he left me waiting.
You must appreciate that time is always against you. It is never kind or encouraging. It gnaws away invisibly at all good things. Therefore, if you have any desire to accomplish anything, even the simplest task, do it swiftly and with great purpose, or time will drag it away from you.