When I got back that Saturday evening, the night was drawing in. But instead of slipping into my building, I lingered outside. I looked to the sky; the last streaks and fissures of sapphire blue on the far edge of the horizon were perishing before the enfolding darkness, and, above, the first stars were breaking out across the night-time vault in a rash of glittering silver. The dying evening was so beautiful in its scope and vastness.
I thought about Gen. Some of the other girls in my class talked about boys incessantly – especially those boys like Qiang Bolin who were good at sport. I could see that Qiang Bolin was handsome too, in a lantern-jawed and well-defined way, and, as those other girls said, he was ‘hot’. But the way they would talk about those boys on the ping-pong and soccer teams – the way they would dissect their movements and compare their looks – made me feel brittle, cold and faraway. For I didn’t know how to have those kinds of conversations. And yet, as hollow and empty and as beneath me as I sometimes told myself they were, they were also the types of conversation that, just for once, I would have liked to take part in.
Gen was about as far away from Qiang Bolin as you could get. Gen was tall and lanky – gawky almost. He walked with a slight stoop. Despite his fastidious tidiness, he didn’t seem that at home in his own body. And yet there was something about him. A detachment, a sense of independence, which made it feel as though he was inwardly amused, as though life itself was funny and he didn’t care if no one else got the joke. Was that sexy? I didn’t know for sure, but when I thought about visiting his house on Tuesday evening, I felt a nervy anxiety that tingled in my belly. Something different, something exciting somehow.
What would I wear? What would I say? I was tying myself up in knots, and I felt angry for getting ahead of myself like this. Perhaps boys invited girls over to do homework all the time. It might not mean anything. And even if it did, did I actually like him? As in … like him? I was sure it was silly, that I was being as frivolous as some of those girls and their never-ending conversations about the boys’ soccer team. And yet I couldn’t avoid the goofy smile that spread across my face. The same fluttering anticipation in my belly. I had the urge to laugh out loud. And it wasn’t just about the class today, or Gen’s request. It was the sudden realisation that life could change, that one’s fate could pivot on a pin, as my grandmother was fond of saying. The future was rushing towards me and for a few moments the prospect seemed wonderful and dizzying.
I walked in the dark towards my apartment building. Then I caught a flicker of light. I saw my grandmother’s small shed with the door ajar. I sauntered over, unwilling to return home just yet. As I reached the door, the smell of grain and bird shit hit me, a rich and musty aroma which could make you hold your nose but for me was familiar and calming, for I had known it as long as I could remember. I could see the figure of my grandmother inside, scattering the feed, and I could hear the excited cheeping of a gaggle of little birds as they bumped up against one another: fluffy chicks with great half-closed eyes, still dozy with sleep and warmth, awakened to feed.
I watched that stout, crooked woman leaning over the little birds – my grandmother’s weathered, wrinkled skin peeling back from her rich, smiling eyes – and I realised that she had always been old to me, and the birds, little more than babies, were so very young. And it occurred to me that there would come a time when there would be no more birds to feed, when my grandmother was no longer in this place and when I would watch her no more. Whereas, before, the thought of the future was like a breeze that blew through me with its sense of exuberant possibility, now it became a shadow waiting on the edges of this small ramshackle shed, where the darkness of night met with the light cast from my grandmother’s lantern.
I coughed gently.
My grandmother turned her turtle-wise face on me and her dark, rich eyes smiled all the more.
‘Hello, Little One!’ she said.
I made my voice as casual as possible.
‘Which Little One do you mean? There are a few of them here!’
For a second she didn’t understand, then I saw the awareness dawn on her face.
‘Well, there is no point in me talking to the birds. They are just birds.’
She was aware of that, and so was I. But I knew she talked to them sometimes anyway.
She straightened up, releasing a satisfied wheeze, one hand pushing against a single stout hip.
‘If you want to help, you can rake some of that hay over there. Check it for mice.’
I picked up the old rake. But my mind wasn’t on the job.
‘So,’ I said, trying to make my voice as casual as possible, ‘a boy has asked me to his house on Tuesday. We are going to do homework together.’
I caught the shift in my grandmother’s posture, the way she momentarily stiffened. I wondered whether I should have told her. But I needed to tell someone.
My grandmother scattered some more seed, and turned to look at me. She studied my face shrewdly.
‘And this boy, he is from a good family, yes?’
‘Oh yes, his family … is very good, I think.’
‘And you like him, yes?’
‘I think so. I think I do.’
She nodded and moved closer.
‘We should talk to your father about this. That is the way these things are done.’
My heart leapt into my mouth.
‘No, please, Po Po.’
The thought of having such a conversation with my father was inconceivable.
‘Then you will have to speak to your mother.’
My mouth dropped open in horror. That was even worse.
‘Please. It’s just homework.’
My grandmother looked at me sternly.
‘Will his parents be there?’
‘Yes, it will be early evening. They will be there the whole time.’
My grandmother frowned. She sucked her lips. And, as if the decision had been made, she spat onto the ground.
‘Okay,’ she muttered.
My heart lifted. I had somehow managed to get away with it. I had escaped the humiliation of my mother’s questions, probing and judgmental.
My grandmother looked me straight in the eye.
‘If that little shit tries to put a baby in you, you tell him that you are on your monthly bleed. And if he still persists, you rake his eyes with your fingers, do you hear me?’
I blinked back at her in astonishment.
‘Ewwwwwwwwwwww. Po Po, ewwwwwwww! That’s disgusting. He’s not like that.’
‘They are all like that,’ my grandmother pronounced sombrely.
But whatever qualms I had about Gen, however antagonistic our relationship had sometimes been, I never felt he was a danger to me. I knew I was safe around him.
My grandmother never told my mother and father about that first meeting with Gen. She kept my confidence. But as we sat down to dinner that night, I felt her old turtle eyes on me, searching my face, thoughtful and concerned.
. . .
Time is a strange thing. The three days that hung between the Saturday and my visit to Gen’s house on the Tuesday evening seemed to stretch into centuries. And yet, when I stood outside his door, my trembling hand on the verge of knocking, it was as if that same period had flashed by in an instant. I felt the clasp of time in another way too. Some years before, Gen and I had been children. He had irritated me back then, and, one fateful night, he had also saved me. He had taken the blame for what happened when those men in uniform had brought us children to a place only adults should know.
Did he think back on that night? Did he ever feel the same tightening in his chest as I did? Did he recall the way we were as kids? Or was it simply a hazy, bygone world for him? Then, he had been to me a bluff annoyance, always able to pull my strings, someone I regarded with a sense of scorn and disregard. And yet here I was outside his door – and the feelings I had were so much more complicated, so much more contradictory. Who did I see now when I looked at him? And who did he see when he looked at me? The stubborn, defiant and dirty-cheeked little girl I once was? The shy and studious creature she morphed into? Or someone else entirely?
As I stood there, these thoughts swirling through my head, it came to me that I had never seen Gen’s house. All my other friends – Jian, Zhen, Wang Fan and Al Lam – had lived in modest accommodation much like my own family. But Gen’s place wasn’t even an apartment. It was a house. And it was something else! It was already dark by the time I found it; with difficulty, I pushed open a gate which must have weighed more than I did. Then I followed a path up to the residence, its walls backlit by orange lights flickering in the gloom.
Eventually I arrived at the house itself. It was a single-storey property, the main section like a large head with broad shoulders, the surrounding wings like an arm on either side – a whole person in repose, stretching out. When I knocked at the door, it was solid and expensive: a perfectly finished black surface overlaying rich oak hardness. My knuckles thrummed but my hand barely made a sound.
I was about to try again when the door opened. In my mind’s eye I half expected a butler in a suit, a kind of awkward, stiff, comical creation, excessively formal, like the guy who worked for Bruce Wayne in the American Batman comic series, but instead I was confronted by a shiny-faced woman with dark, fluttering eyes. I knew straight away she was Gen’s mother. She was young-looking. She had softer features than Gen, but the eyes were the same, and she had the same thin lips. It threw me off balance for a few moments, for they were different and yet the resemblance was uncanny; it is strange to see someone you know looking out from the features of someone you have never met.
But the physical resemblance was where it ended. Whereas Gen’s face was always sombre and serious, almost as though it had considered carefully in advance what expression to wear, this woman’s face was lively, almost hypertensive; her eyes flickered and shone with a barely suppressed animation.
‘So happy you have arrived. You must be Gen’s friend. Welcome to our home. Please come in. May I take your jacket?’
She fluttered and flustered around me, a warm, gentle but incessant breeze, and before I knew it she had removed my outer layer of clothing and floated me through a shadowy hallway into a dining room illuminated with gentle light. I could smell duck pancakes and pork dumplings (if my nose wasn’t deceiving me, and as a hungry teenager it rarely did). Gen’s mother hustled me to a seat at the same moment Gen stepped into the room. It was a further shock to see him out of his school uniform. He was wearing a loose-sleeved blue shirt and a pair of dark trousers, and his thick black hair had been tossed to one side. He looked almost relaxed. I remember thinking it suited him.
He strode up to me, kissing me on both cheeks. The gesture was casual, and at the same time sophisticated, European, and I almost dropped the bag I was carrying. I recovered my bearings and took out the cookies my grandmother had baked. I presented them to Gen’s mother. She tore open the paper and looked at them with an expression somewhere between shock and delight. She blinked back at me.
‘Wonderful,’ she said.
And then, in a fainter voice:
‘Truly wonderful.’
She seemed in that moment almost disorientated, blinking out at us, and Gen took the cookies from her hands, gently, almost the way one might retrieve sweets from a confused toddler.
‘Let me take these, mother,’ he murmured.
He looked at me.
‘Thank you.’
We sat down and began to eat. Gen’s mother talked rapidly. She was wholly focused on me, and it felt strange that an adult should lavish me with such attention. Of course, there was something in her manner and speech that was not quite adult at all. She talked to me of Gen, her son, and her face shone with pride as she spoke of his achievements. I could see the corners of his lips curl in a pained wince – he would mutter softly under his breath, ‘Really, Mother, she doesn’t need to know about that’ or ‘Really, mother, I didn’t win the competition, actually I came third …’ – but none of this was enough to dampen her enthusiasm.
For his part, Gen’s voice was soft; he spoke to his mother with a gentleness that I couldn’t have imagined, for there had always been, in my experience of him, a sharpness, even when he was a child. Now his mother had made him awkward, watching him with that doe-eyed gaze of wonder, and yet his tone never hardened. Every now and then, his eyes would flicker towards mine, then move away with some embarrassment.
‘Would you care for some yellow wine?’ his mother asked.
‘Mother, I don’t think that is appropriate …’ Gen began.
But I cut across him gently.
‘I would be delighted. Thank you.’
The two women at the table, she and I, shared a complicit smile as she poured.
My own mother distrusted alcohol on principle; my father would have a sip at mealtimes now and then, though never excessively, as I think he always feared losing control.
My grandmother, however, had no such constraints; she had entered into an unholy pact with another of the rebel grandmothers on our corridor and between them they had cooked up some lethal baijiu over the years. That spirit would have been too strong for my tender taste buds, but my grandmother had been in the habit of slipping me a snifter of wine underneath the table ever since I was about seven years of age.
So a little yellow wine didn’t bother me.
We clinked glasses, Gen’s mother and I, and this elicited a wry grin on his part.
Then everything changed. Gen’s father walked into the room.
Gen’s father didn’t look much like Gen. Gen was angular, tall and lanky. His father was short and compact. But their movements were similar. Considered, precise.
His father walked towards me, I made to stand up, but he waved me to stay seated. He bowed to me. I bowed back.
‘Very pleased to meet you!’
His voice was clipped and husky; he seemed almost Japanese in terms of his rigid formality.
Gen’s mother had changed. Whereas with her son, she was overwhelming in her positivity, with her husband she became much more measured and hesitant. It was clear that she too was in awe of him, but it was something closer to fear than wonder. She hovered around him, asking him if he wanted one thing or the next, and for the first time I saw a look of real irritation cross Gen’s face. His father was polite, but curtly rejected her offers; defeated, his mother sat down.
For a few moments we ate in silence. I wanted to make conversation, to say something, but not only was I shy, the food was also so dammed good. Gen’s mother must have been a good twenty years younger than his father, and she struck me, even back then, as being artless and perhaps a little childlike – but once they were gathered as a family a formality descended on the table as thick as fog. It was bizarre to me, because my own family meals were filled with chatter and recrimination and dirty jokes (my grandmother) and every sort of belching, snuffling, eating sounds you could imagine.
Eventually his father spoke.
‘Honoured guest, may I ask what your parents do?’
I was taken aback by the question. No one had ever called me ‘honoured’ before.
‘Well, my father. He was … I mean he is a geographer and meteorologist. But I think he only works part-time now. And my mother, I think that maybe she just works to look after us.’
I gave an awkward giggle.
The seriousness of his expression was unchanged. He regarded me gravely.
‘This is good. Your father is a scientist. We need men of science now, more than ever. The world is changing. I am also a scientist of sorts. But I don’t try to predict the weather. I predict the economy. And in this situation, our nation is on the back foot. The Singapore economy has continued to accelerate. One suspects that the Taiwanese economy will be next. I have already invested in shares there. And I hope that our own economy might follow suit if our current administration were to be a little bolder.’
He bowed his head after he had made this pronouncement, not waiting for my response.
But in the event, it was Gen who spoke and not me. He spoke softly, but with an authority which belied his years.
‘Perhaps there is more to life than coins and yuan, Father.’
A silence fell on the room, so thick you might drown in it. Gen’s mother looked at him with horrified, muted eyes.
Gen, in turn, continued to pick at his duck pancake with the indifference he seemed to have been born with. And in that moment, I admired him a great deal.
His father spoke to him in the same clipped way.
‘Perhaps there is. But it is coins and yuan which provide the basis for your life! For the food you are eating right now.’
For the first time I could see the lips of Gen’s father tighten, something stronger than dispassion in his gaze, something which resembled anger.
Gen glanced up at his father. His eyes clouded over in a vague, grey non-emotion.
‘Yes, Father. Of course, Father!’
He returned to his food. We all did, except for his mother. She looked as though she had been slapped. And I wondered how many times this conversation had played out.
Shortly afterwards, we finished eating. Gen’s father left the table, made his apologies softly, and bowed at me once more as he took his leave. I couldn’t say I liked his father exactly, but I felt that he was an important man, and the fact that he took the time to apologise to me and bow to me as though I was someone important gave me a little thrill inside. His mother kept asking me how I found the food – she must have asked me some ten or eleven times, always with that same supercharged brightness which verged on hysteria. But her I liked a great deal.
I followed Gen into a different room.
‘My parents won’t bother us in here. My mother doesn’t like this room, and my father doesn’t leave his study after 7 p.m. We can concentrate on the project.’
I smiled awkwardly and scrunched up my fingers. Now that we were alone, words seemed harder to come by. And while the dining room had been bright, and the table sleek and modern, this room was cosseted by shadow, the furniture classical and expensive, but dusty-looking. Everything was softened by gloom. In the far corner was a smouldering fire. Gen went over to it and began to stoke it, beckoning me to one of the old chairs.
I laid my school satchel by the side of the chair and sat down. It groaned and wheezed as I sank into it, the noise somewhat ridiculous against the timeless sound of the crackling flames. Gen and I looked at each other, smiling involuntarily, and the sense of tension was broken. When he smiled spontaneously like that his face lit up. He was … pleasant-looking.
‘Who’s your figure?’
‘My figure?’ I asked, blinking.
‘The person you are going to critique in your presentation.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Chiang Kai-shek. You can’t go wrong with Chiang Kai-shek. Everyone thinks he was a rotten egg!’
‘Hmm.’ Gen pursed his lips, thinking about my selection. ‘That’s true enough.’
He wasn’t disapproving exactly, but I felt he was holding back from commenting further.
‘Who are you going to choose?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll come up with someone. There are enough bad people to choose from.’
I nodded sagely.
We slipped back into silence. We looked at each other.
‘Well, if you want to use those encyclopaedias, go ahead. They are … very comprehensive.’
I hadn’t taken in the books. But there was a perfect set of hard-backed encyclopaedias whose black leather was seamed with gold-embossed binding. They looked magnificent. I ran my finger along the spine of one and the tip was kissed by a thin layer of dust. I thought about the old man and his bookshop and how much he would have loved to get his hands on a set like this. I looked back at Gen.
‘May I?’
‘Sure.’
I looked up Chiang Kai-shek. He was listed in volume thirty-six of the forty. I took it out and returned to the chair. For a while, we were quiet, Gen scribbling a few notes, me skimming my finger across the page, the arch and delicate writing luminous in the soft light of the fire.
I breathed out in a sigh of wonder.
‘Wow!’
Gen looked up at me.
‘It’s so interesting. Chiang Kai-shek and the Chairman. They were the most bitter enemies. But their lives parallel each other’s. Chiang Kai-shek took power in Taiwan in 1949, the same year Mao came to power here. And they ruled for almost three decades. And they died within a year of each other. I’ve heard that twins sometimes do that too. That when one dies, the other dies soon after.’
I had let my enthusiasm carry me away; it was rare I had the chance to talk about the contents of books with anyone other than the old bookseller. And sometimes, when the old man was peering at me, resting his chin on one hand, I had the distinct impression he’d fallen asleep.
But Gen’s expression was keen and also cold, that slight half-smile playing across his lips.
‘I don’t think you should read any great cosmological destiny into that. Chiang took power in Taiwan because he had fled Mao and the communists that same year. And as for the time of death, well, they were both old men. Old men die. That’s what they do!’
He looked up at me, his eyes glinting amusement. All at once I felt about three inches tall.
‘Yeah, well, who are you going to choose then?’ I muttered mutinously.
Gen looked at me with a serious expression. Every hint of sarcasm was gone. He spoke softly, sincerely.
‘I tell you who I’d like to choose, if I was brave enough to stand up and denounce him.’
‘Who?’
He looked at me for a few moments longer. And almost whispered the words.
‘My father.’
I thought about this.
‘But why? Your father seems … okay.’
‘You think,’ muttered Gen.
‘Well yeah. He was really polite to me at the table, he treated me like an honoured guest. Whereas my lot – my mother, grandmother, father and brother – when we are having dinner, they treat me more like a … dishonoured pest!’
I laughed a stilted laugh. I was trying for levity – the sudden turn in conversation had caught me off guard – and I winced at the poorness of my pun.
But Gen didn’t seem to have heard.
‘You know, he bought those encyclopaedias some years back,’ he said bitterly. ‘They were very expensive, as you might imagine.’
I looked at him.
‘That doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing to do.’
‘You don’t understand. Because you don’t understand him. He paid all that money, but he never uses them. He has never opened a single one. He bought them because he thinks that an educated, important man should own a set. Do you see?’
I waited for him to continue.
He bit his lip.
‘That … for him … is the most important thing. Appearance is all-important. It doesn’t matter if he reads the books, as long as the people who come to this house think he does. There is the appearance that he projects. And then there is the reality underneath. Whether it be encyclopaedias or whether it be …’
He turned away. He was on the verge of saying more. Of opening up.
‘Whether it be?’ I whispered softly.
Gen turned to me. All the artifice was gone.
‘Whether it be passing himself off as a good family man when actually he has a girlfriend in the city centre he stays with while claiming to be away on business.’
I was shocked. I couldn’t speak. But part of me – and I felt deeply ashamed – was thrilled. For this was the most personal revelation I could have imagined. And Gen had chosen me to share it with. At once, I injected a tone of serious responsibility into my voice.
‘But can you really be sure? I mean, do you know for sure?’
He looked at me. Not angrily, but ruefully.
‘I am not stupid. And I’m not a kid any more. I know the signs.’
He seemed to me in that moment to be so impossibly worldly. The thought of my mother or father having an affair would never have occurred to me. Until that moment, it would have seemed like something which broke the laws of physics and nature.
‘And your mum?’ I asked softly.
‘She knows. I know you probably think she is a bit superficial because she is so smiley all the time. And the truth is, she’s not that smart. But she’s a really lovely person. And because she wants to believe that other people are that way too, she overlooks it. She overlooks what … he … is. She pretends it isn’t happening. She’s the one I feel for. Because she doesn’t deserve it.’
He turned away.
I felt something move in me. I reached out for him and placed my hand on his.
‘I don’t think you deserve it either.’
He turned to me almost in surprise. The darkness of his eyes shone with the beginnings of tears. It was as though he had never considered this, his own vulnerability.
He looked at me. Automatically and instinctively, he leaned forward and kissed me softly on the lips. Then he blinked again, as if awakening from a dream.
‘Oh God, I … I am sorry. I didn’t mean to …’
He began to move away, but I stopped him. I felt the kind of tenderness I used to feel with my little brother when he had a tantrum and I was furious with him, only then he would be sorry, and all at once I’d be overwhelmed by sweet anxiety. But now there was a more adult intensity present too. I cupped the side of his head and guided him, gently, back to me, our lips meeting again. Despite the awkwardness which had always marked our interactions, and our mutual wariness, it was perhaps the most natural, the most wonderful second kiss I could ever have hoped for.