BALIK KAMPUNG

(GOING BACK)

 

ZEN CHO

 

 

The image of Lydia, driving out of hell on a motorcycle, clinging to her demon’s back, provides a striking start to Cho’s story about a spirit seeking out the cause of her death. This rich tale is full of Malaysian myth and religious custom, a heady brew that brings alive the sights, smells and sounds of this journey towards a hoped-for understanding. I think you’ll see from what follows why Zen is already building a reputation for being one of those most exciting and incisive new genre writers around.

 

 

THERE WERE A lot of unexpected things about being dead. The traffic was one of them.

Time passed differently here in the netherworld, so Lydia might have been perched on the back of her cheap motorcycle, clinging to her demon, for hours or years or centuries. Every once in an aeon they moved about three centimetres along. The light of the living world shone maddeningly at the end of the tunnel, not so very far away from them – but the intervening space was crammed full of hungry ghosts, using every form of transport they could beg, borrow or steal for their trip up north for the Festival.

“Can’t believe the traffic is so bad,” she said to her demon. “It’s halfway through the month already!”

“You should see this road on the first day,” said her demon. “The queue goes all the way back. Like this is not so bad.”

Since the dead were only allowed into the living world for one month in each year, the time was precious. Lydia was only so late because nobody had been burning hell money for her, and it had been a struggle to get together the funds to buy some form of transport.

She’d only managed to get the bike by promising to be bonded to a hell official for the next year. It was what they used to call a kapcai motorcycle – a small, aged Honda of the kind hawkers took their kids to school on and Mat Rempits raced with. Fortunately her demon was as bony as most demons were, and didn’t take up much space.

The demon had been another surprise. It had appeared the day she arrived in the netherworld. At first she had been too stunned by grief, too numbed by strangeness, to question the strange tangle-haired creature who followed her around hell. By the time she got around to questioning it, she’d grown used to its unvarying calm, its voice that was like the echo of the voice inside her own head. Its answer felt like something she had already known.

“I am your personal agony,” it said.

“What agony?” said Lydia.

“You’ll figure it out when you understand why are you a hungry ghost,” said the demon.

Hungry ghosts were the spirits of the unfortunate, unlamented dead: those who were killed violently; who died burdened by unfulfilled longings; who had been greedy or ungenerous in life; who were forgotten by their living. It was obvious to Lydia which category she fell into.

“I don’t care about my parents anymore,” she said to her demon.

It wasn’t bravado. Lydia had long made her peace with the fact that she was not the daughter her parents had wanted, and they were not flexible enough people to love her in spite of it. Stuck in the traffic jam, she thought not of them but of Wei Kiat.

Thinking about him and their home in Penang made the wait easier. The tunnel leading up to the human world wasn’t the most pleasant place to while away a few hours. The rock walls were painted with the inventive torments to which the wicked dead were subjected – disrespectful sons and daughters having their tongues torn out; incompetent physicians being chopped to pieces; litterers being made to kneel on spikes; cursers of the wind being bitten by grasshoppers and kicked by donkeys.

Around Lydia the other hungry ghosts were discussing what they would do once they had got out.

“Bastard, if the fella knew how to do his job I won’t be dead now. I’m gonna find his clinic and then that guy better watch out. He better get used to killing his patients.”

“It’s not like RM5 is such a big deal. It’s just annoying, you know? I was dying, also she couldn’t bring herself to pay me back. Maybe it’s too much to possess somebody for that, but if not it’s gonna keep bothering me lor.”

“Yah, go for the Christians. The less superstitious the better. They’re not prepared because they don’t believe in hantu all that. Muslim also, I guess, but I prefer to possess Chinese, feels more comfortable... anyway, have you ever met a skeptic Melayu?”

“No lah, I’m not gonna do all this possessing stuff. Die already, no point holding grudges. I’m gonna go home, see how my relatives are doing, smell my ah ma’s rendang.”

“You’re going home to see your family, is it?” said one of the older ghosts to Lydia. She was travelling by bullock cart, and spoke a Hokkien so strangely accented that Lydia struggled to follow it.

“Yes,” said Lydia. “What about you, auntie?”

“Hai, I’m too old to have relatives to visit,” said the ghost. “I have some great-great-grandchildren in Muar, but they all speak Mandarin and play their iPhones only. Nowadays I only go to the living world to see the shows.”

“Auntie must find the shows very different,” said Lydia. “Even when I was small I remember there were more operas, puppet shows, that kind of thing. These days you only see girls in miniskirts singing Cantopop.”

The antique ghost lowered her voice to a confidential whisper.

“I don’t mind the Cantopop girls,” she said. “After all, the weather is so hot. Why shouldn’t they wear something cooling?”

“That’s very open-minded of you, auntie.”

“Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you can’t be flexible,” said the old woman. “So you’re visiting your family har? Where do your parents live?”

“My husband, auntie,” said Lydia. “He’s in Penang.”

 

 

IN PENANG. AS she sat there in the stinking dark, her arms wrapped around her personal agony, a vision of the small terrace house they had lived in together rose up before Lydia. The low gate, with the patches of rust where the grey paint was peeling away; the narrow front yard Lydia had populated with potted bougainvilleas. She’d had them in every conceivable colour: magenta, rose pink, peach, lilac, deep purple, white. Every day she’d come home from work and exult over the wash of colour spread out before her front door.

She saw her house so clearly she could almost feel the grainy texture of the grille swinging open under her hand. Their living room was floored in fake marble, dim and cool even on the hottest of days. Lydia had furnished it with old-fashioned cane chairs and rag rugs. Wei Kiat had admired her taste.

“You should be an artist,” he’d told her. “You look at things so differently.”

She was always finding out delightful new things about herself with Wei Kiat. He saw in her depths her parents would never have seen, talents and virtues unsuspected even by herself.

She knew she could not expect her home to have stayed the same while she was dead, but there would be a profound comfort simply in seeing it again, in feeling the tiles cool against her bare feet, and smelling the air in her house: a smell that was a mix of old newspapers, clean laundry, and the curry perpetually being cooked next door.

“We’ll have to come out at KL,” the demon said. “That’s the only exit for Malaysia.”

Which was why she’d needed the motorcycle. The dead were disappointingly limited: it was no more possible for her to fly herself to Penang than it would have been when she was alive.

At least, Lydia reflected, the demon knew how to ride a motorbike. She’d never ridden a motorcycle in her life – her parents had thought it unsafe, and Wei Kiat had driven her everywhere in his Chevrolet – but the demon piloted their vehicle with consummate ease.

When they finally emerged into the living world, somewhere behind KL Sentral, it was several hours past sunset. The lights of KL were blinding after the dim red caverns of hell. The starless vault of the night sky seemed too big. Lydia hunched down behind the demon as if it could protect her.

“Hopefully we missed rush hour,” said the demon. “Jam out of hell, jam out of KL, everywhere also jam jam jam. If the government stop playing the fool and improve our public transport we won’t have this problem.”

“Do we have to stay here?” said Lydia. She’d grown up in KL, but she felt no nostalgia for the city. The constant honking of car horns made her flinch. The living, bustling around her, smelt too strongly and felt too sad.

“You don’t want to visit your parents?” said the demon. “We can drop by TTDI first.”

Lydia shook her head, her hair brushing against the back of the demon’s polo shirt.

“Home,” she said.

 

 

THE FURTHER THEY got from KL, the less populated the roads were. The glow of the orange street lights on the unfolding measures of asphalt, so infinitely familiar, calmed Lydia down.

“When are we reaching ah?” she said.

“You know how long it takes,” said the demon. “You sure or not you want to go?”

“What else do people do when they have holiday, aside from balik kampung?”

“You don’t want to find out how you died meh?”

Lydia didn’t remember how she had died. She hadn’t tried to recover the memory. She didn’t want to be like other hungry ghosts, clinging to historic grievances, hagridden by old sorrows. As in life, she had managed to get by in hell by sheer discipline: focusing on survival, hope, the image stored inside her of the red-tiled roof of her home, glowing in the sunshine.

“It’s not important,” she said.

“If you don’t even know where you’re coming from, how can you understand where you’re going?”

“Eh, are you my demon or my feng shui master? Can you please concentrate on the road?”

“It’s not like it makes any difference if we have an accident,” said the demon grumpily, but it shut up.

 

 

THE DEMON INSISTED on stopping off at Kampar. “We should try the curry chicken bread. It’s very famous.”

“We don’t need to eat or pee,” said Lydia. “Stop for what?”

“After you’re dead for a while you won’t need to act human anymore, but you haven’t adjusted yet,” said the demon. “Might as well eat. You’ve never had curry chicken bread before. Remember what the auntie said. Dead also still can be flexible.”

“Easy for her to say! She got nobody to visit,” snapped Lydia. “I only have fifteen days. And I might have to waste time trying to find Wei Kiat.”

“Wei Kiat is not going anywhere,” said the demon, unmoved. “Come lah, let’s make you less hungry.”

Since they could hardly stride into a restaurant to order the world-famous Kampar curry chicken bread, it was necessary to hang around the restaurant kitchen and dive at the dishes before they were carried out to the living punters. This made Lydia uncomfortable.

“They can still eat,” the demon said. “It’s not like we’re stealing. We only eat the spirit of the food.”

“It feels weird,” said Lydia. Being a spirit gave her a weird double-vision – on one level, in the material world, the plate of chicken bread her demon had despoiled was perfect, unmarred; in the spiritual world, half of the bun had been removed and the curry was leaking out the side. “Can’t we just go outside and eat the offerings?”

As was usual during the Festival, there were offerings of food laid at the roadside: small piles of rice and fruit and lit incense set out by devotees.

The demon was offended. “Fine,” it said. “If you want to have cold rice instead of chicken curry, suit yourself.”

“Maybe I will!”

“Hungry ghosts I’ve heard of before,” said the demon, “but I didn’t know you got such thing as dieting ghosts.”

It was when they were walking back to the motorbike that they heard the unmistakable sound of the Hungry Ghost Festival being celebrated by the living: the strains of Cantopop, blaring at top volume out of doors at ten o’clock in the evening.

“We might as well check it out,” said the demon. “What else do people do when they have a holiday?”

Lydia pretended not to hear it, but she found herself drifting towards the light and noise.

The Festival tents had taken over a whole road. A huge effigy of the King of Hades dominated one tent, flanked by effigies of the guardians of the underworld. An urn full of joss-sticks sent up curls of scented smoke before his stern blue visage.

The tents bustled with people, both living and dead. Food was set out for the ghosts, a much more attractive array of dishes than the roadside plates of rice. Lydia took a pink rice cake. As she drew back from the table she almost upset another ghost’s plastic cup of orange cordial.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No problem,” said the ghost. He was struggling to balance a paper plate loaded with food and his cordial. “You’re only eating so little ah? There’s a suckling pig at the other table there.”

Lydia was going to say she wasn’t hungry, but realised in time how stupid that would sound. “Is it? I’ll go find it. Thank you, uncle.”

“That’s right,” said the uncle. “Not like when we’re alive, can celebrate New Year, Thaipusam, Hari Raya, Mooncake Festival, all that. Now we only get one holiday a year. Better make the most of it!”

Everyone seemed uncommonly cheerful – the dead stocking up on provisions, the living praying at the various altars. Lydia hadn’t even known she’d grown so used to the hangdog looks of the other ghosts and the bureaucratic indifference of the hell officials. Despite her sense of urgency, her mood began lighten under the influence of the atmosphere.

She only glanced at the stage set up at the end of the road, but it was enough to tell her that the show would have pleased the open-minded bullock cart auntie. The girls onstage would not have looked out of place at a beach, except for their go-go boots.

As at every ko tai she’d seen in life, the front row of seats was reserved for the ghosts. The only difference now was that she could see the occupants.

But the focus of interest seemed to be somewhere else. She followed the crowd to another tent, where a man in robes was blessing the living. She was about to move away again when the man turned and looked straight at her and the other hungry ghosts watching.

“Sorry ah, good brothers,” he said. “I’m almost finished here. Let me drink some water first and I’ll be ready.”

“He’s a medium,” said Lydia’s demon. “Why don’t you talk to him?”

“I thought only the living liked to consult mediums,” said Lydia. “Send messages to their relatives all that. Spirits talk to medium for what?”

While she was speaking a queue of hungry ghosts had formed behind her. Lydia paused, embarrassed.

“You think what?” said the demon. “For the same reason lah.”

 

 

“GOOD EVENING, SISTER,” said the medium. The beads of sweat on his forehead and upper lip gleamed in the fluorescent light, but he smiled at Lydia with genuine friendliness. “Have you eaten?”

Lydia nodded. “The food is very good.”

“The Festival committee is run by the local hawkers,” said the medium. “So the catering is not bad. How can I help you, sister?”

Lydia had to pause to formulate her question. Despite growing up in KL she only spoke enough Cantonese to order food and watch subtitled Hong Kong dramas. Her parents had spoken Hokkien, and living in Penang had meant that what little Cantonese she’d had was rusty.

The sentence she produced wasn’t the sentence she’d expected, however. She opened her mouth and heard herself say:

“How did I die?”

The medium blinked. “You don’t know meh?”

“I don’t remember,” said Lydia. “Can’t you tell me?”

The medium looked confused. He took off his spectacles and polished them before putting them back on.

“Sorry ah, sister,” he said. “Usually the living come and ask me questions. The good brothers and sisters just send messages. Advice, life lessons, that kind of thing. You are the ones with the wisdom what.”

“I was only late 20s when I died,” said Lydia. “It was recently only. I haven’t had much time to become wise yet.”

“Ah,” said the medium. He scratched his head. “If sister gives me your name I will try to find out for you how you passed on. I’ll look tomorrow.”

“By tomorrow I won’t be in Kampar already,” said Lydia. Frustration surged in her. She should never have stopped to talk. Every minute she spent here was a minute she could have used to get to Wei Kiat. And she hadn’t even asked the right question. “Never mind. Sorry to waste your time, sifu.”

“That is not a problem,” said the medium. “To contact you is very easy. I am a medium. That’s my specialty. You will know what I find out. That one at least I can promise.”

“Thank you,” said Lydia. She started to get up, but the medium stopped her.

“Wait a minute, good sister,” he said. “I have a question for you, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t have any advice for anybody,” said Lydia.

“No, no,” said the medium. He looked embarrassed. “I just want to know, what’s your birth date?”

 

 

THE SIFU’S EYES unfocused, his face twitching. The light of transcendent enlightenment filled his face. His mouth fell open. From the dark depths of his throat issued an awful bellow:

“Eight two one one!”

Even in her impatience this surprised a laugh out of Lydia.

“Oh, 4D,” she said. “So people can buy lottery tickets, right?”

“Chinese like to gamble too much,” said the demon disapprovingly.

The sifu was still shouting numbers to an attentive crowd when they walked away from the lights and smells of the festival.

The demon had parked the motorcycle next to a drain inhabited by bullfrogs, and their importunate moos filled the night air as the strains of Cantopop died out.

“Can we go now?” said Lydia, but suddenly, for no reason, she was afraid.

What would she find when they arrived in Penang? If Wei Kiat no longer lived at their house it would be difficult to find him. He might not even be in Penang anymore. And if he was, would he be different?

The living world seemed suddenly strange, quick-moving, unknowable. Lydia wished the sky was not so large. She wished, for the first time, that she was still safe within the caverns of the netherworld, protected by the rock ceiling from change and inconstancy.

“You’d better sleep first,” said her demon. “If not you’ll be tired. We can leave in the morning.”

“I’m dead,” said Lydia.

“Then there’s no better time to rest, no?”

 

 

THE SKY WAS brightening when they set off again, and dawn crept over the country as they sped along the North-South Expressway. Lydia kept dropping off, her face smushed against the demon’s bony back.

Every once in a while she would open her eyes to the landscape of the annual journeys of her childhood. The dark green sea of oil palm trees; massy white cumulus clouds in a harsh blue sky; the narrow barren boles of abandoned rubber tree plantations; the occasional water buffalo standing patiently by the road. They zoomed past orange earth stripped clean and levelled flat, waiting for development; temples with elegant roofs curving towards the sky, roof tiles blinding in the sunlight; billboards advertising herbal supplements and massage chairs.

The shape of the green-furred mountains against the sky brought back an unpleasant memory – the first time she remembered really seeing them and noticing their beauty. She’d been eight and she’d wanted to ask her parents why some of the mountains were red on the inside and some white, but they were fighting in a whisper, believing her asleep.

“I told you to ask for discount. These people want to make the sale, ask only they will give to you one.”

“Haiyah, bought already,” Lydia’s father had said. “At most also won’t save more than RM100 lah. What for heart-pain over a small thing like that?”

“For you maybe it’s not much. Easy lah you, every day come home at five. I’m the one who has to do OT, pay for Lydia’s tuition everything. At the end of the day still I’m the one cooking dinner. For some people it’s very easy!”

“If it’s so difficult marrying a civil servant, why didn’t you marry some tycoon?”

“I’m just stupid lah,” Lydia’s mother had snarled. “That’s why, no?”

Lydia had hunkered down in the back seat, making herself small. It had seemed politic to continue being asleep – absent, unhearing.

“What’s wrong?” said the demon.

“Just remembering,” said Lydia. She told the demon about it. “Dunno why I’m so upset also. They all fought all the time anyway. But Chinese New Year was the worst because they had to be in the same car for five hours.”

“Aiyah,” said the demon. “Be more xiaoshun lah. Your parents what.”

Lydia experienced an unfamiliar spike of outrage. “Aren’t you supposed to be my personal agony? Whose side are you on?”

“Of course I’m sympathetic,” said demon. “But you’re dead liao mah. Your parents also were suffering. Angry for what now?”

 

 

SOMEWHERE PAST THE Kedah-Perak border, the demon went off-route. Lydia only woke when the bike started jolting over uneven ground.

They were riding over a dirt track in an abandoned patch of oil palm plantation merging into secondary jungle. It was hot and very, very still.

“What’s happening?” Inarticulate fury rose in Lydia. “Bastard, always delay here, delay there. You don’t realise my time got limit, is it? You think I sold off a year of death to a hell official just to cuti-cuti Malaysia? Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you to the place where you died,” said the demon.

They only stopped when they were deep enough that they could no longer hear the noise of traffic from the highway. A heaped black pile of oil palm fruit sat rotting by the path. A lizard ran over the ground by Lydia’s feet, lifted its head as if it heard something, and hurried on.

The demon squatted by a tree and looked at Lydia as if it was waiting for something.

“Why–” Lydia realised she was crying, but it was only her demon, after all – only her personal agony whom she had carried ever since she left the living world, only the part of herself she knew best, and she ploughed on: “Why everything has to be some kind of life lesson? I don’t need to know what. It’s done already. This’s supposed to be a vacation. I’m not trying to find myself or what. I just want to relax and see my husband. What’s so wrong I cannot do that?”

“What’s your agony, Lydia?” said the demon.

“My parents lah!” wailed Lydia. “Ask me something I don’t know! My parents give me headache my whole life. Even after I die also I still have to deal with them. But I can’t forgive, OK? You think I didn’t try? I wanted to be a good daughter. I sent them money everything. But you can’t control how you feel.”

“You’re wrong, Lydia.”

“What do you know? You’re just a demon,” said Lydia. “You can’t force yourself to love somebody.”

“Not that,” said the demon. “You’re wrong about the agony. Look around. You sure you can’t remember?”

Lydia looked, but the tears in her eyes had turned the world into a brilliant blur. Shapes lost their meaning. She only saw blotches of vivid green, black shadow, blinding patches of sunlight.

“I don’t know–” she started to say, but she felt a warmth in her hand. She looked down.

An orange light was kindling within her palm. As she watched, the flame crept outwards, forming a thin ring of fire. Within it unfolded a scrap of paper. The fire flickered out.

It was a newspaper clipping, its edges burnt black. Lydia had never received a burnt offering before, but she remembered the kind uncle’s face, turned to her in puzzlement. The medium in Kampar. He had sent her a message after all.

At first she thought he’d wasted his time. She couldn’t read it. It was a Chinese newspaper clipping, and Lydia had gone to a government school. Her Malay was pretty good, her written Chinese non-existent. But she didn’t need it in order to understand the picture.

It was a picture of Wei Kiat. She recognised him at once, even though he’d ducked his head to hide his face from the camera. The photograph was familiar – the stern figures of police officers flanking the sullen convict emerging from the court room. She’d seen dozens of such pictures in the newspapers in the course of her life. She’d never known anyone in them before.

“You want me to translate?” said the demon.

Lydia shook her head.

“Do you remember now?” said the demon.

She looked around that buzzing empty space. The only noise was the whirr of insects’ wings. You wouldn’t hear anything from the road.

It was a good place to have done it.

“No,” she said, but there was a hollowness inside her that contradicted the denial. The knowledge settled into her. Lydia knew how it had come to be that she was dead.

She sat down.

“Why did he kill me?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said the demon.

“I thought he loved me.”

“Yeah.”

“I loved him so much.”

“Yeah.”

Lydia stared at her hands. “My family was so... like that... I thought I was so lucky to find Wei Kiat. He was my chance. Before I never knew what it’s like to be happy.” She looked up. “You really don’t know ah?”

“I don’t have any answers,” said the demon.

“You know how to ride motorbike and read Chinese.”

“I’m what you need to find your hunger,” said the demon. “Doesn’t mean I know anything important. I’m just your sadness. I’m just the fact your true love betrayed you.”

“You didn’t have to say it like that.”

She sat with her head bowed, weighed down with grief, and it seemed as if a very long time had passed when the demon’s voice broke in on her sorrow. It was as if the voice was merely another strand of her own thoughts; it was a song playing soothingly at the back of her head. It said:

“Now you know. What does it matter? In the next life you won’t remember this sadness. You’re already dead. Let go lah your attachments.”

Lydia lifted her weary head. “Why are you saying all these pointless things to me?”

The demon fell silent. Then it said, “What do you want to do now, Lydia?”

Lydia scrubbed her eyes, but instead of a scathing rejoinder, what sprung to mind was a vision of the sea. A blue-grey expanse seen over the low wall that bordered Gurney Drive. The waves glinting so brightly in the sun that they almost seemed made of metal. Around the bay the dark green hills rising, and against them the prosaic white and grey forms of condominiums and office buildings.

She saw her bougainvilleas crowded together in her little garden, their delicate petals shivering at the touch of the breeze. Her heart clenched and relaxed.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“Penang?”

“Yeah,” said Lydia. The bougainvilleas, and the sea.

“Not a bad idea,” said the demon. “They should still be celebrating the Festival. Penangites really know how to layan ghosts. At least the food will be good.”

“Is food the only thing you think about?” said Lydia.

“Somebody has to remember you’re a hungry ghost,” said the demon with dignity.

 

 

IT WAS GETTING on for the evening by the time they got to Penang Bridge. The time of what her mother called falling light – the sky a mellow orange-tinged grey, the harsh light of the sun softened by dusk. Over the demon’s shoulder Lydia could see the lights running along the bridge, the red backlights of the cars drawing away, the dark mass of the island rising ahead of them. And on the further shore, the lights of home.