Yean retreated into the seclusion of her bedroom, closed the door and windows, drew the curtains and switched on the air-conditioner. Its comforting hum flooded the room as she lay stretched on her bed, head resting on the back of her hands, a lone lanky body. And she clung all the more to this sense of an aloneness which for the time being would have to be her sole protection against the discordant voices of aunties, uncles, parents and anyone with any familial link to her, pouring their unwanted advice into her ears. One word more, and she would leap up and tear the whole house down. There was this streak of madness in her, which she somehow couldn’t quite explain. Perhaps she had something in common with Mak Sean Loong after all. Perhaps madness was infectious. She had caught it and her whole family had been infected by it. They were all mad. The whole lot of them. Mad. Mad. Mad.
“Yean,” her father had said, “I’ve telephoned your uncle in California. You will join your cousins there next week or next month as soon as this business is over.”
Tyrant! Dictator! She had wanted to scream. Instead she had almost whined, “But I want to stay with mother.” And then the bombshell. Her father said, “Your mother will go with you to keep an eye on things.”
What a scheming man he was! No wonder he was a manager! In a single sweep, he had cleared away all obstacles. With Mother gone, he would be free to carry on with his latest girl—her own age—young enough to be his daughter! And it was sheer stupidity on their part that made her mother and eldest aunt blind to her father’s scheme.
“Ya, ya, very good idea,” her aunt had exclaimed. “Sister-in-law here can go over and learn about the restaurant business from Tai Pak over there. His restaurant is doing very well.”
“Yes, very good idea, very good,” her second uncle had readily agreed. Agreed! Of course, he had to agree. He depended on her father for business.
“If my business improves, hah, I will send our Ah Pow over there too. Children nowadays are very difficult to control. The gov’ment tell us to watch them. Ya, we’re the parents. We should watch them but so difficult now—not like last time. What they do or think outside the house, we don’t know. How can we know what their hearts think! The gov’ment should not blame us for any wrong our children do. I hope, Yean, you have not given your father any trouble.”
Toadying creature, she had wanted to yell at him if he weren’t so elderly.
And then her eldest aunt not to be outdone had to add, “Aye, so troublesome when they grow up. They think they know everything.” And her aunt had recited her favourite Cantonese proverb, “When in trouble, you call to heaven, you’ll find heaven has no ears. You call to earth, earth has no mouth. Then you’ll find everyone is deaf and dumb in the face of trouble. Listen to us, Yean. We’ve eaten more salt than you’ve eaten rice. Now you study when you can study. When your foundation is firm, you can do what you want. When your pouch is full, you can use the money in any way you like.”
That was her family’s philosophy—to gird themselves with money, money and more money. Society was there as an opportunity for them to make money. People were there to be used for business or pleasure. Her family simply had never thought it necessary to make any returns for what they had taken or enjoyed. All they wanted was security through having more money.
The soft continuous hum of the air-conditioner soothed her jarred nerves and tired mind. She fell asleep, thinking of Pei Lan and the others who had no money. Sis had not said anything about them at all, except that they had been detained. Poor Pei Lan! If any of the workers should need help, she would persuade her father to help out even if she had to agree to go to California.
A slanting ray of the five o’clock sun slipped between the partly drawn curtains and rested on Yean’s face. Awakened by its gentle warmth, Yean opened her eyes and for a while enjoyed the dance of the dust particles. The sun was sinking and that patch of sunlight was moving slowly from her face to the edge of her bed. With great reluctance she got up and changed. The morning’s confrontation with her gang and family had robbed her of her energy. Poor Sis had been so confident, so adamant that they had done nothing wrong. As far as Sis was concerned, they were a group of people who had come together to protest against a universal injustice.
“What’s wrong with that? We acted on our convictions. We dared to take the risk. If we didn’t do this, we would’ve allowed this worldwide phenomenon of the modern technocratic state to turn us into robots.”
Yean had no answer but Sis, as usual, did not expect answers. Perhaps she saw her as her student who still needed teaching. Sis could be so blind, always focused on the cause, never the persons around. She couldn’t help but be worried about what was going to happen now.
“Nothing to worry about,” Sis had blithely declared. “They’re trying to make mountains out of molehills. They have to justify their high pay, these officers. They are digging up everything from my past—from our first moratorium to I don’t know what. Even my private relationship with Hans is suspect and blackened. They want to paint everything black. Paint us as the agents of blackness.”
Yean had had to interject with another question to stop her blistering attacks on the modern police state. Sis would make a good lecturer. What’s going to happen to Hans, Dr Jones and Rev James now? Their houses had been used for so many of their meetings.
“Nothing much, I don’t think they can pin anything on them. They were protesting against their own American government, not ours. I don’t think the police can make them out to be agents of subversion. But they can’t leave the country yet, their passports have been impounded.”
And what about Mak, Yean had asked.
“Oh, they can’t do anything to him so they’re releasing him on bail today. Hans and I are going to fetch him. I’ve called for a meeting at Jim’s place tonight; please tell the rest. I’ll see you there—about eightish.”
Yean closed her eyes for a moment, stretched her limbs and got up. She sat at the edge of her bed, feeling tired and heavy. She wished she had half of Sis’s confidence and energy. None of her limbs wanted to move. She examined the big toe of her right foot and lifted it toward her closet. Ah, just long enough to open the door without having to move the rest of her. She prised open the door and rested her leg. Now, what would she wear, and immediately chided herself for her frivolity. Typical spoilt bourgeois kid, that was what she was. No point denying it. She smiled, and lay down again on the bed as fragments of the morning’s discussion with her gang drifted back into her mind.
Gang! Why couldn’t Sis see that there was no more gang? It was just an illusion that they could believe in the same things forever.
“To tell the truth, none of us are close to her these days. We don’t know her work in Jurong.” Peter was being blunt as usual.
“Ya, don’t you think she was rather mysterious in the past few months? Always so many meetings in Jurong with the Chinese students and workers and we don’t even know their lingo.”
Aileen was right to some extent. They did not know Mandarin beyond the level of polite greetings but then neither did Sis.
“But she had Mak.” True, and she had to agree with Aileen.
“Mak is another suspicious character,” said Ken, but he had never been able to get along with Mak anyway. Then Kim had come straight to the point.
“I’m not going,” she had declared. “I’m more concerned with people like Ser Mei than the war in Vietnam which I can’t do anything about.”
She could see that Kim’s social work experience was beginning to tell. Helping the individual was more important than changing the system. The system could not be changed; therefore help the individual to cope. Kim’s response would have been spurned by Sis as easy compromise. There had never been any dialogue between Sis and the rest of the group. It was always a case of being for her or against her. She had always talked to them, never with them.
Yean got up from bed and stood in front of the closet, fingering the many blouses hanging inside. Finally she chose a red silk blouse and a pair of beige slacks.
Perhaps they were all dumping Sis now that trouble had come. But then these were basically decent guys. She had known them all her life. And anyway to be fair, they had never agreed to the SWA wholeheartedly. Not everybody agreed with Mak. One of the workers had said, “Mr Mak, scholar, big man, okay for him to talk like that about government. They from the big school always talk like that.”
“They don’t agree with him but they support him, stupid idiots!”
But she did not agree with Peter’s glib conclusion. Mak had his good points and the workers were grateful. He had helped them financially. He had gotten them legal aid; helped with the filling of forms, work permits and the writing of official letters, all of which were important and serious matters to illiterate men. Mak had guided them through this treacherous terrain so that they could eat their rice in peace and they were grateful. He was from the university but he had treated them as friends, and in the moral scheme of things as seen in the kungfu films, one would go to the gates of hell for such a man. Her Cantonese nanny used to say,
“Owe another a gift of flower
Owe a debt of a thousand years’ fragrance
Owe another a deed of gratitude
Then ten thousand years of remembrance is due.”
Looking at Pei Lan’s affection for Sis, she was sure that that was what made the workers support Mak and Sis. And yet somehow there was something wrong. But what?
Yean looked in the mirror, peering closely with tweezer in hand, and pulled out a stray hair from her beautifully arched eyebrow. Her face looked rested now. The rings around her eyes, the result of many sleepless nights, had grown faint. A dab of powder would hide them. There! Her face looked presentable now. Delicate and well fed. Rest, good food and pleasant surroundings would always protect girls like her from the leathery skins and broad wrinkles of women slogging to make ends meet. One day, Pei Lan, married with three or four kids, would become one of these hardened, loud-mouthed Ah Sohs with thick pink hands like her washerwoman. Angry at the unfairness of life, she proceeded to brush her hair. Always the poor and the uneducated suffered the most. Her father was sending her to California! Nothing would happen to her! Nothing would happen to her gang! And they had refused to turn up for tonight’s meeting. Yet could she blame them? How she wished she could accuse them of being irresponsible. She was even more angry with Sis but she could not say which was the more annoying. She still agreed with many of the things Sis had said yet somehow, the way things were done ... Ouch! she had brushed too hard. She stopped, replaced the brush on the dressing table and started to undress. Ever since the formation of the SWA, Sis had become a different person. She used to talk about being an individual, but gradually politics had become an obsession. To the gang, Sis was no longer the woman they had first known. Perhaps they were being stupid, her gang? Perhaps they had outgrown Sis and now they blamed her? They weren’t giving Sis the freedom to grow and change. Why should everyone remain the same all the time? Yean felt a growing confusion. Whose side was she on?