At the same time, another story is lived.
Once there was a boy, Kuan. This boy knew nothing of the man who came before, and who was to come into his world and turn it inside-out. When this boy was young, he slid down banisters, wore ironed white shirts and lived in a house with a grandfather clock. His father wore a real Rolex, and they had a chauffeur to drive him to lessons. He learned to speak French and English, and played the guitar and double bass in the school band.
He was born in Cambodia and grew up in its capital city, Phnom Penh, where no building was more than four colonial storeys high. French terraces snuggled up against their modern boxy counterparts, their sulky-jawed balconies jutting out. On these balconies after work, the people of the town would stand and watch each other and the street below. The heat made people’s muscles feel melty, and their hearts beat slower. Men and women merchants would sweep the front of their stores in slow motion and jam the broom in between the slots of their roller-shutters. They would wipe down the metal and then sit outside and wait to hear the sound of crickets. The evenings stretched like coloured looms across the sky.
Kuan’s house was one of the French-styled ones, and served, as most buildings did, as a factory, business and private residence. The ground floor of his house-factory buzzed when the reel of the plastic-bag-making machine was switched on. The machine rolled out undulating flat white tubes, which they carried, still warm like a limp bride, to the second floor. Here were the men of the factory, before they were sent off to war, wearing white singlets like cotton facsimiles of the bags they made, operating the cutting machine.
Bags were not the only things the factory produced. In fact, the bags were secondary to his mother’s first business, on the third floor of the house. This was Kuan’s favourite area, the Room of Letters, where the walls were lined with hundreds of thousands of words, each made of lead. Each Chinese character would be selected and loaded onto the cliché, a printing plate cast from movable type, and then passed through the printing press. ‘All the words in the world,’ his mother told him in their native Teochew Chinese dialect, and this was how he learnt to read when young, helping his mother string together sentences. How he loved modern technology.
His father did not live at home with them, because Kuan’s father had two wives. Every time his father had an argument with his mother, he would move back to his first wife’s house.
Kuan’s mother was a woman who could read a face in a matter of moments to determine whether she wanted anything to do with its owner or not. After hopping off the boat from Chaozhou in China, where she was in deep trouble for writing articles denouncing landlords who abused peasants’ rights, she had found work as a schoolteacher at the local Phnom Penh Chinese school. That was when she met Kuan’s father, a Chinese man also from Chaozhou, and decided that he was red enough for her. Unfortunately, he was already married with two daughters, but that didn’t stop them. They had each met their intellectual equal. They had to be together, but once wedded, their minds were welded like a knife with a blade on both ends. Sharp and brilliant but bloody. They argued all the time, and their arguments probably started because of Kuan’s father’s house-jumping habits. ‘Why do you have to go back there to those dull-eyed worms when I’ve given you six sons?’ his mother used to yell. She had a special way with adjectives.
His father would heave a big gasping sigh and shake a thin finger at her, about to open his mouth and expel more words, but she always beat him to it. ‘You will be the death of me, I tell you!’
‘No!’ his father yelled, ‘I am telling you, Huyen Thai, you will be the death of me!’ And so it went, each accusing the other of plotting their demise until they were heaving with the effort of trying to detail their own ends.
Left for stretches of time to fend for herself and her ten children, Kuan’s mother became no-nonsense. When her nephew arrived from Long Mountain raving about the printing factory at which he had worked in China, Kuan’s mother told him, ‘Let’s no longer work for other people. Let’s start our own business.’ She entered into a partnership with her nephew, whom they called Chicken Daddy. That mysterious moniker was already attached when he arrived so no one knew its origin, but it was probably a childhood pet name bequeathed by an affectionate grandma that had stuck, so much so that Chicken Daddy’s own children were known as Chicken Sister, Chicken Brother and the youngest, Egg.
Chicken Daddy provided the capital, and Kuan’s mother provided her labour. In the beginning they had a single pedal-powered printing machine, and when her children slept, Kuan’s mother would sit up half the night at the machine, filling orders for flyers, advertising pamphlets, letterhead stationery. She even printed invoice books and made tear-off perforated holes in the pads with the unthreaded needle of her sewing machine.
Kuan was the fifth son. His earliest memory was of his mother taking him to a Charlie Chaplin movie once, by himself, when he got perfect marks in a school test. They rode in the back of a cyclo. At the cinema, Kuan watched the tramp twist his shoelaces around a fork and pop them into his mouth. By the time Kuan reached his twenties, his brothers and older sister had married and moved out of home. Some were living in Hong Kong, others in communist China. His parents had sent their first three sons to take part in the great proletarian revolution. Only his older brother Kiv remained in the family home after marriage.
Kuan’s father decided that he should have a fiancée too. They found him a nice woman who had been educated at the same high school. Sokim had liquid black eyes and the first time they met, their parents sat between them. They were so shy they could barely look at one another.
As the world changed, suddenly so did the street signs. One day, on government orders, all the Chinese lettering on the shops was painted over. No more funny foreign writing on the streets. Soon enough, the ethnic Chinese schools were closed down.
A girl named Kien, who lived a couple of blocks away from Kuan in a rented house with her parents and nine siblings, found herself tossed out of her grade two class. She spent a year roaming the streets during the day, mucking about with a group of her classmates who had also been ejected from school. Once, for fun, they let the air out of the tyres of the Mercedes-Benz cars parked in the wealthier end of the city. Then she found work in a factory, and the money she got at the end of every week ended her seemingly endless boredom.
On the day of Kuan’s engagement to Sokim, all the workers in his family’s plastic-bag factory heard footsteps up above and saw flashes of red. Double-happiness signs made of cut-out paper were stuck over the front of the store, and the girls in the factory were hoping for a glimpse of the bride-to-be in the afternoon when they had their midday break. One of them, Kien, the girl who operated the bag cutter, would be his future wife, but they did not know that yet, because she was only thirteen, and life had not yet been turned inside-out.