When they found me, I was unconscious, lying at the edge of a farmer’s field. They said it looked as if I had tired of working the earth at midday and decided to take a nap in the grass. That’s what it looked like, if not for the abandoned huts just paces away, all of them torn wide open by a bomb years ago. All that lived in the ruins were insects and mold born from that comfortable damp, and clouds of mosquitoes hatched from ephemeral pools formed in broken bowls, a child’s wooden top, crushed underfoot.
When I woke a day later, I reached out for the baby, wanting to pull him to me for his morning feed. Instead, my hand found nothing but air. That was when I remembered what I had done. How I had done it. I wanted to cry for my loss but was too tired, too hungry to do so. So I slept until the sound of birdcalls, sharp and very close, jolted me awake. Mynahs, I thought, opening my eyes. The room was filled with harsh, midday light and the air stung with the smell of disinfectant.
“You’re finally awake. Here...” A nurse put her arms around my shoulders and helped to sit me up. She brought me my lunch, sat next to me, and held the empty tray in her lap as I ate. She told me that a woman and her children had come across me while they were out digging for root vegetables.
“When they brought you in, we all thought you were—” She shook her head, catching herself. I continued eating, following each tiny trail of food with the spoon, scraping it clean. When I returned the bowl to her, she said, “Oh, I almost forgot to ask. We couldn’t find any papers on you so I’ll need you to give me your name and address.”
I looked away and said nothing.
She tried again, repeating her question first in Malay, then faltering Hokkien, to make sure that I understood.
I shook my head.
“Do you know where your parents are?”
“No.” I paused. In that moment, I heard the other people in the ward, different voices, different languages and dialects, telling each other about who and what was left in that place they used to call home. They talked about leaving the hospital and returning to their lives as soon as they could. They talked about what they would do, afterward.
Afterward. I had thought about this moment for so long, swung between shame and hope so many times in the past few years, that faced with it now I felt paralyzed. Shame or hope. Both. Afterward was nothing like I thought it would be.
“I’m sure someone is looking for you.” The nurse touched my shoulder. I flinched, and wished I hadn’t when she removed her warm hand. But she didn’t seem to mind, continued talking, informing me that I had an infection, that they were giving me medicine for it. I let her finish. It only occurred to me to ask when she was about to leave.
“Did they find anyone else? Did they bring anyone else here?”
“Anyone else?”
“Other girls. My age. They would have worn the same clothes...” I looked down and realized only then that my dress was gone. Instead I was wearing a white cotton gown, soft from washing.
“No, I don’t think so but I can ask around and let you know if there was anyone...”
I nodded and stared down at the sheets. When I looked up again, she was gone.
I fell asleep easily but woke repeatedly in the night, convinced that I’d heard Cheng Xun whimpering. And I would find myself lying on my side, my body curled around an empty oval on the bed, the way I’d slept for the past two weeks. My chin just above the top of his head. Each time I remembered he was gone, I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I hadn’t been found. When I woke again, it was morning. The nurse on duty gave me my medicine and urged me to get up, get my blood flowing a little, or else I was going to develop bedsores. She stripped the blanket off me and stood with her hands on her hips until I slid my feet off the bed.
I got up because what else was there to do? I made rounds on my floor, staying close to the wall in case my legs gave way. Most of the rooms I passed were filled with soldiers, mostly ang moh, who looked nothing like the proud, striding foreigners I used to see in the city. These men looked like mere clutches of twigs, skin stretched so tight over their rib cages that I could easily imagine fitting my fingers between each curved bone. Then I passed a tall window and saw the length of my own body reflected in the glass. Stopped with the shock of recognition. I looked years older. A withered stalk of a woman. Then I saw my mother’s face in my own and stood staring until it became too painful to look.
When the nurse from the day before came back to check on me that afternoon, I asked for a sheet of paper and a pen. I wrote my name on it, pressing so hard that the nib went through the paper several times, marking the white bedspread. When I was finished, I handed her the paper. “That’s my name. Wu Wang Di.”
I told her my address and she repeated it back to me to make sure that she got it right.
“It won’t be easy, finding them. I don’t think anyone in my village has a phone.”
She nodded and said, “I’ll try my best.”
I thanked her. If she had stayed on, I might have told her that I hadn’t seen my family in years. That I had been put away for a long time, and it was the time spent away that made me this way, made me speak as if each word was a cold stone in my mouth, and my thoughts rough-cut gems that I was reluctant to spit out. I might have told her I was afraid my family wouldn’t want me back. That too much had happened. I would have told her, but the look in her eyes, careful and searching, suggested that she’d arrived at the truth on her own. The sun was past its peak when I fell asleep again. This time I dreamed that I was back in my little room in the comfort house. Cheng Xun was next to me and he seemed hungry for the first time in days. Relief flooded my chest and I was unbuttoning my top to feed him when I woke, blinking into the bland light of the hospital ward. My breasts were aching with milk, had made damp, dark spots in the hospital gown. It was then that I realized I wanted to be back there, in the black-and-white house with its boarded-up windows, and I wondered why I had run, why I’d left.
I woke on my fourth day in hospital to find my mother watching me. Another dream, I thought, like the dreams I kept having of my baby, and reached out. Except when I touched her arm, I felt warm skin. Dry and sun-scored, but alive.
She was smiling a terrible, painful smile when she said, “Nu er.” Daughter. Compounding my disorientation. Nu er. How many times had she called me that? Never, I was sure. I wanted to tell her, this woman, that she had the wrong person. That I was sorry, I wasn’t who she thought I was.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” she said, “or you’ll make your ma cry again.” She touched my face with her hand, and it was this that finally woke me. Her hands, I knew. The hands I knew from her slaps and pinches, the yanks they dealt when she thought I was being too slow. I felt the familiar strength of them, the grip of her bones, her work-ready muscles, as she helped me up to sitting.
“Ma,” I said.
For several minutes, all we could do was stare at each other. She looked as if she had aged a decade, and as she got closer, more. The skin over her cheeks was drawn down, caved in where her molars used to be. On both sides of her mouth, deep grooves stretched and deepened as she spoke, reminding me of the wooden puppets I once saw as a child, their jaws falling open and snapping shut at the twitch of a string. I wondered if she could see what had been done to me. What I had done. And it was this last thought that made me regret not having washed up that day. I would have spent the morning scrubbing myself if only I’d known. Instead, I pulled back from her and hid my hands under the sheets so she wouldn’t touch them.
Twice she started speaking—“I thought you were... Never imagined I would...”—only to choke and swallow her words each time. Eventually she managed to say, “It’s been so long.”
I nodded, wondering if I could speak again, trying to remember the things I used to say in my past life as a daughter, someone’s child, but I wasn’t sure there was enough of me left. For a few moments I was almost frantic, afraid that the person I was before—their unplanned-for daughter, their Wang Di—had disappeared entirely. The way a body burns and leaves nothing recognizable in its wake. Just a few shards of bone, ash. Handfuls that slip away in the wind.
I took to parroting her or giving monosyllabic answers but she did the bulk of the talking, asking few questions, making observations. “You’re so thin.” “So are you.” “Your father couldn’t make the trip.” All the things I wanted to say filled my throat, stopped right in the middle so that I could only swallow and stare. It was all I could do not to choke on everything that I couldn’t put into words.
“I brought you something—in case they aren’t feeding you well here,” she said, getting out a tiffin tin filled with rice porridge, and on top, sweet-potato leaves stir-fried with chili paste. The sharpness of the flavors made my eyes prick with tears. After a few hurried gulps, I felt the burn of the food in my stomach and made myself slow down. I knew I would be sick later but I couldn’t stop. As I ate, my mother told me about my brothers: how Meng had stopped going to school ages ago, how Yang was away—the Japanese had sent him off the island to work. She didn’t know where. The last she had heard of him was in 1943.
“Work? What do you mean, work? How long has he been gone?”
“For a while now. Years. After they took you—” Here she shook her head, as if to deny the memory of what had happened. “We waited and waited for you to come back. And when you didn’t... He got the idea to go to the Japanese police to try to find out where you had been taken. This was a few months afterward...in 1943. He went with a neighbor, one of the Tan boys—he was the one who told us that the police had taken Yang, arrested him for no reason. We thought he was in prison but got a letter from him toward the end of the year—just a few lines saying that he was in Thailand. Nothing after that.”
He’s dead, I thought and looked down so I wouldn’t have to see the fervid hope on my mother’s face.
“Don’t look so worried. I’ve been praying to Guan Yin for you and your brother. And see? It worked! I’m going to keep looking for Yang. When everything has settled down, he’s going to turn up. Just like you did—I knew when I saw Nurse Noor that it was good news.” I pictured the nurse getting off the bus, walking the long way into the kampong while people stared from windows and doorways. I should thank her, I thought. “Your father will be so happy to see you. He stopped working for the Japanese last November and has been looking for a job ever since. Things are so bad that it can only get better. Oh, he will be so happy to see you. You don’t know how worried we all were. Three whole years.”
Two days later, my mother helped me into the trishaw that was to take us home. The journey took us through busy streets, past cars and buses and lorries, carrying people and goods meant for somewhere else; things were happening that did not involve soldiers, trucks, or planes. There were hawkers tending their food stalls and people bent over bowls of noodles at wooden tables, women bargaining for their groceries, people selling bundles of vegetables and sweets from a tray strapped from their necks. All of this bathed in a morning light so sharp it made my eyes water. Things had gone on. I felt my stomach churn with this realization. Once in a while though, I spotted figures, stock-still amid all the movement and noise. An old man, mere skin over bones, squatting by a wall. Another, talking to himself. No one else seemed to see them or mind their presence, passing them as if they were walking past a tree or mailbox or a lamp.
Then I saw her. Lying in a gutter, her face half-hidden behind matted hair. It looked as if she had been there for a day or two; flies were beginning to settle on her face but she made no movement to brush them away. Huay? I thought, leaning out, causing my mother to exclaim and clutch at me as if she thought I was about to leap out of the moving trishaw. But the woman’s face was too sharp, and I could tell that she was older and much too tall even from where I was. Shen jing bing, I told myself, insane. Huay was dead. This was just another woman. Just another. I wondered where she had come from, if her family was still alive and looking for her or if they preferred her gone, like this. I thought about Jeomsun, hoping that she had left the island, gone back to her family and mountains in Korea.
My muscles tightened as we entered the village and I had to open and close my fists to get my hands to relax. There was young fruit in the trees, light green against the dark of the leaves. Stray cats on the dusty ground, showing their bellies to the sun. Home—I wouldn’t have thought this possible a month ago. We passed a few houses which looked empty and others with familiar faces looking out, gawking. I wanted to disappear but Jeomsun’s voice was in my ear all of a sudden, telling me to wave and ask what they were staring at. I ignored it best I could, pushed away her small, elfin anger, but wondered how my neighbors would react to my return and how much they knew.
“We’re home,” my mother announced.
Home. I was just over the threshold when I froze and took a step backward, fighting to keep acid from rising up out of my throat. I’d forgotten what it smelled like—home, a thing that used to be a bitter but steady comfort. Because underneath the scent of the kitchen, with its oils and heady sambal spices, was the smell of sun-browned skin, of male bodies and their sweat and dark, sweet breaths, all of it sharpened by the heat. It’s just Ba and your brothers—no, brother, I corrected myself, act normal. Still I stayed by the door, watching my mother wait, her smile slightly fading. My father, sitting in his usual chair in the living room, had risen up, was extending his arms in welcome and walking toward me.
My body felt light. I could run, I thought. I could run now and never have to explain myself, or be around my father, my brother, both of whom I suddenly, unreasonably dreaded. It might have been this—my face, contemplating flight—that made my father stop. He dropped his hands to his side.
“You’re back,” he said. Then, as if suddenly reminded of where I’d been for all these months, these three years, he looked at the floor and returned to his chair, holding on to the armrests as he sat himself down.
“Ba.”
He nodded. “You’re home now.”
I turned away, adjusting my eyes to the dim indoors, and saw that my brother was crouching by the bedroom door, watching me. He was thirteen now, I realized, and a long way from when I’d last seen him. There were lines around his eyes, and below them, a darkness, as if he hadn’t been sleeping.
“Meng?”
“Jie,” he replied, more out of reflex, it seemed, than anything else for even as he said it, he was getting up. I thought for a second that he was coming toward me, but he turned midway and left the house.
“Must be going out to play,” my mother said, bustling in the kitchen, not looking at me.
I went into the deserted bedroom. Everything was as it was. The spare rattan mat, which Yang used to unfurl on the floor at bedtime. That one pillow, which I always relinquished to Meng. I found my clothes stuffed deep into the bottom of the dresser, moth-eaten and much too big, and changed into them, hoping to feel like myself again. When I came out from the room, everyone was gone.
My mother went back to work that morning, hurrying in the hopes that the water wouldn’t be cut off before she had finished washing her basket of laundry. I offered to accompany her but she shook her head. “You’re as thin as a bamboo stick. You’ll be no help.”
To make myself useful, I scooped out the sweet-potato porridge my mother had prepared before she left into bowls, filled a small dish with sambal. When everyone came back at noon to find the table laid out, there was an awkward shuffling before they sat down to eat, much too politely.
“Oh, you really didn’t have to...” She made herself smile, shifting the bowls around.
“I wanted to be useful. And you, Meng, have you been going to school? Helping out?” I’d wanted to tease but the words came out shrill—sounding like a reproach.
Meng didn’t look up. Instead, my mother replied for him, “He went to school only when they were giving out milk. When they stopped doing that a year ago, he just stayed home. Helped out with the garden now and then. Isn’t that right?” She moved her elbow to prod Meng into answering but stopped shy of touching him.
“Meng has grown but you look thin, both of you,” I said. Nothing. My parents darted their eyes up, then down. I realized then that I’d said something untoward and embarrassed everyone. I must have forgotten how to be myself, I thought, my old self. In the black-and-white house we’d talked about food, aches, and pains, our various bodily functions. Said little else that wasn’t about our bodies, survival. Three years.
My mother cleared her throat. “We’re okay. But only because we have the garden.”
They bolted their food. My brother and father got up to leave within five minutes of sitting down. Then it was my mother, murmuring about collecting the laundry. I sat there for almost half an hour, savoring every spoonful of sweet-potato porridge, looking at the damp rings their bowls had made in the wood. Wondering at the carved emptiness in my stomach even though I couldn’t eat another bite. A feeling like homesickness. And I realized that it was gone: home. My idea of it. My place in it.
As I dried the bowls, I could see and smell the smoke from my father’s roll-ups, hear his faint sigh as he stamped the last of it into the ground just outside the door, where he remained for most of the afternoon.
That night, the same thing happened though I said nothing. All three of them left the table within minutes of sitting down, my mother turning her back to me in order to wash the dishes at the sink, clanking and splashing as much as she could to discourage me from talking.
I could be a ghost, I thought. One of those lingering souls that people just live with and skirt around, as long as it doesn’t do them any harm.
At the end of my first week back, I had learned to talk about the weather, about how salty or good or bad the food was, about the neighbors. Nothing else.
Things were shifting back into place after the Japanese surrender. Schools were still shut, and my brother, left to his own devices, stayed outdoors most of the day except for lunchtime. It was a small house with little place to hide. Still, he managed to avoid almost all contact with me. When he returned, he said nothing, did not even acknowledge that I was in the same room or look up when I called out to him. I told myself to give him time, that he must still be getting used to me after not seeing me for three years. He was just a child after all.
Dinners remained uncomfortable affairs. Afterward, instead of sewing or doing homework and sitting by candlelight as we used to do, my parents retreated into the bedroom. Meng rolled out the mat in the sitting room and flipped through an old comic book until it got too dark.
I could hear him scuffling against the floor in his sleep as I lay awake in the bed we’d shared together when he was a child. Each time I fell asleep, I would startle awake again and reach for the baby, thinking I was in the black-and-white house. With sleep though, came dreams; I would see Huay and Jeomsun most nights, and if I was lucky, Cheng Xun as well. Then I would wake, my face damp, remembering how I’d left them like that. The relief of being back with my family and the guilt of it spilling over into each other so that I almost wished I hadn’t survived. Almost.
Things will go back to normal, I told myself each day, almost believing it as I watched my family over dinner. Waiting for one of them to raise their eyes and look at me. I had been home for a week and they were still looking straight through me, half listening whenever I spoke. Meng, especially. He just needs time to get used to me again, I thought, pushing away thoughts of my baby, refusing to acknowledge that I saw him as a replacement of sorts. I told myself to be patient until I couldn’t anymore. My mother had left for the public tap one day and my father was outside, smoking, when I went to my brother.
“Meng, why don’t we go to the market? We can get you iced gems from the corner shop.”
His eyes flickered, tempted for a moment before he said, “I don’t want anything from you.”
“Don’t be silly, you love iced gems. Come on. It’s me, your—”
“Leave me alone,” he spat, his voice lower, no longer a child’s. “Why did you come back?”
I was still staring, wondering the same thing when he continued, “We thought you were dead. But they said you were living with the Japanese, those riben guizi. Do you know what that meant for us? For me? I lost all my friends. People talk about us. They gossip.”
It took me several beats to recover myself, before I said the first helpless thing I could think of. “Who? What do they say?”
“Everyone. My classmates. They told me what you are. They called me a traitor, just because you’re my sister.”
Before I found my tongue again, he was getting up. “You should have just stayed with the riben guizi. You should have just stayed dead.”
The next morning, I followed my mother when she left for work in the morning, persisting even though she kept telling me to go back home. In the end, she let me carry the bucket and washboard as she knocked on the neighbors’ doors and retrieved bags of dirty laundry from different women. No one paid me any mind. She was beginning to look more at ease when we ran into Yan Ling’s mother.
“Eh! Wang Di, isn’t it? Where have you been hiding her all this time? Wah...so skinny.” She reached forward to circle her fingers around my wrist.
I pulled away and put my hands behind my back.
My mother laughed. An empty, out-of-tune laugh. “She was staying with family, up north in Malaya.”
Her eyes flickered. “Oh, of course, of course... I don’t know if you heard but my Yan Ling got married a few months ago. Moved to live with her husband’s family.” She smiled and pointed vaguely east.
I wanted to ask her how Yan Ling was but my mother was pulling me away.
“Nice to have you back.”
People began to talk. It started quietly, with questions about where I had been, about what I had been doing during the war. My mother just smiled and murmured about having sent me to live with a relative in Malaya, but it was a bald lie and her manner was too transparent. People started to sidestep us in the streets, tried not to meet our eyes even as the morning crowd at the market made it impossible for them to turn and walk in another direction. Customers stopped opening their doors when my mother came around and she lost precious work. Neighbors whom we had lived close to all our lives, whom I had known ever since I was a child, whispered among themselves whenever they saw me. Often, when they gossiped at the public outhouse, their voices carried in with the breeze, loud enough so that we caught snatches of conversation. They neither referred to me by name, nor called me “Mrs. Ng’s daughter,” which they used to do. After several days I caught on. I wasn’t Wang Di anymore, not to the neighbors anyway; what they called me instead was this: wei an fu, comfort woman.
I told myself that it could have been worse. That there were worse things to bear than this gulf between my family and me. Worse things than having to keep silent about Cheng Xun, about Huay and Jeomsun. Years later, I heard about a girl who made her way home, only to have her parents proclaim that they had never seen her, never known her, or spoken her name in their lives. She waited outside the hut where she grew up until it started to storm. Just as quickly as she had returned, she disappeared again, as if washed away by the rain and wind. And then there are those who didn’t make their way home from the comfort houses; those who didn’t board the ships that were meant to bring home prisoners of war and female captives from the neighboring islands, believing—rightly or wrongly—that their families would never open their doors to them. So they stayed away. Then there are those who never got to choose, who didn’t make it that far, not even close. Even Jeomsun, the most dauntless of us, had been rendered helpless in the face of this particular hope. Not of surviving, but of seeing her family again; it was the only thing that cracked her pragmatic facade—her manner becoming childlike when she talked about going home after the war, and then, a day later, almost collapsing inward as she told me she would never be able to face her family again. I wondered if she had decided to return to Busan after all. If she’d made her way to the docks so that she could join the hordes of people clambering onto the ships sailing to Indonesia, Korea, and the Philippines.
In the end, I told myself that my parents had lost too much to banish me as well. My mother clung on to the hope that my brother might return one day and though I knew Yang was gone for good, I said nothing to her. My mother’s version of the truth—that her eldest son was stranded in another country, was surely making his way home—was the only one she could live with after my abduction, after the death of her parents in China.
“Such a pity that you never got to meet them, your nai-nai and ye-ye. Both of them passed away in the same week, first my mother, then my father. I only got the letters months after the fact,” she said as she chopped up sweet potatoes, tops and all, for dinner. “I made my own funeral offerings to them with what little we had and prayed for their reincarnation. I also prayed for you and Yang, that they might help deliver both of you back home...” Here her words trailed off, as if she were still bargaining with her parents in her head—just one more favor, one more before you move on and take the shapes of your new lives. “I knew that they were ill but there was nothing I could do. All they needed was some medicine, I think. If I’d had anything to spare...”
It was this. Her guilt and the thought that I would never know if I didn’t ask now. “But what about the money? Didn’t you get anything? From the...the Japanese?” I could hardly say it. The words.
“What money? What are you talking about?” Then it dawned on her, what I was referring to, and she put the blade down as if making a point. Shame or anger crawled up her neck, splotching it pink. “Don’t think for a second that we got anything from the Japanese. Even if we did, we would’ve given it back if it meant that you could be returned to us.” Here, her eyes darted left and right. Whatever it was, the thought winged away as quickly as it’d appeared. My mother left the kitchen and I picked up the knife, a chipped, unwieldy thing, the cold metal a rude shock in my hand.
I let this fresh revelation steep in me for hours, let it gather in the pit of stomach, believing it gone until I tried to close my eyes that night and found that I couldn’t. The fact that my family had gotten nothing, that I had suffered for nothing, was less a surprise than an additional fact that I had to live with.
Years ago, my father had made a dusting motion with his hands when he mentioned how daughters were meant to be married off, how his family name would, thankfully, continue with Yang and Meng. I was, in the words of my parents during their most desperate (poorest) moments, useless. Disposable. In my little cell in the black-and-white house, I had comforted myself with the thought that my time there might give my family some relief in the way of much-needed cash for food or medicine. That there, at least, I wasn’t absolutely useless. That it might make the difference between life and death for them. That was how I bore it, the rapes, the unforeseeable beatings, the humiliation of never having a choice when they told me to sit up, open wide, lie down and shut up. It was how I stayed my hand from reaching for the bottle of antiseptic and tipping the clear liquid into my throat, how I put the dress on every morning after my shower instead of ripping it, twisting the cloth until it became a pale blue noose.
Did I do it to myself? Was it all me?
I was left to wonder what I’d been doing then. What reason I could give—if anyone asked or found out the truth—for doing what I had done in the black-and-white house if it hadn’t been for my family.
This voice, my own, became another voice out of the chorus I had to listen to at night, when the quiet of the house and the village gave way to whispers, altogether as loud as a bell tower in my head, I heard over and over again—Mrs. Sato’s; the murmurs of the women around me, so soft they were nearly mute; the numerous men, at once faceless and distinct, and their deep laughs, thrumming through their bones and flesh and skin as they stepped into my room.
For the rest of the time I lived with my family, my mother and I spoke no more about Yang. All of them, Meng, my mother, and my father, avoided being alone with me, as if they were afraid any intimacy in number would encourage an outpouring on my part. I was, for most practical purposes, a person in quarantine; my sickness was without cure and kept eating away at me until I could hardly see anything of myself. All I could see when I looked at my reflection was Fujiko and it wasn’t long after my return home that I broke the only mirror my family owned, a cheap plastic thing kept in the main room, which I had to step on in order to shatter. When it finally did, the little frisson of pleasure faded much too quickly and I had to put my foot down in the shards to ease the pain I couldn’t reach. My father had walked in then, and looked at me as if watching one animal ravaging another. His face one of blank horror. It was then that I knew my parents might never again see me for who I was. My father said hardly anything to me at all unless it was by way of my mother; the things he did say were confined to the topic of food, either in a single directive: “Eat” or a question: “Have you eaten?” or “Aren’t you going to eat?” when I stopped midway through dinner. He couldn’t save me then, and must have felt helpless for years. Now that I was back, it seemed he was determined to make sure I could survive, albeit in the most elemental way, by bringing home food from the kitchen garden and making sure I ate. There was no malice in his demeanor, but his eyes flickered, lost, whenever they had to meet mine. There was only one way they could deal with this, one last thing they could do to secure my future.
“I think it’s time to find you a match,” my mother announced one evening over dinner. “Auntie Tin will take care of it.”
I said nothing and looked up at my father. His eyes were dull but he pulled the corners of his mouth up into what he thought was an encouraging smile. I simply nodded.
I took to going out only in the morning, before dawn. Sometimes I saw the night-soil man—stooped, old as water—carrying his full buckets from the outhouse and bringing back the empty ones. He would cross to the other side of the lane whenever he saw me and I thought at first that he was shunning me too, until he nodded one morning as I passed. Then I realized he had always done it, that people had always crossed the street to avoid him. Then another thought: that there were people who didn’t know who I was, what I had done. It was during one of these walks that I stopped in front of a house with teal blue shutters, just like ours. I knew without knowing how that it was Huay’s. It seemed to be empty; there was no sign of life, no chickens roaming in the front yard, no guard dog barking. Not a sound inside either.
I went to my mother as soon as I arrived home. “Ma, do you remember Huay? Family name Seetoh. They had a little shop. Lived in the west of the village.” The girl who had been taken along with me. The girl who did not come back.
“Yes, of course.” She didn’t look at me but concentrated on tapping out spoonfuls of ground coffee into a pot. “They bought a shop space in Ang Sua and moved there.”
“Where? Do you have an address?”
“Oh, no. I don’t know. It happened very quickly. Why do you ask?” There was a grainy edge to her voice, warning me away, but I made fists with my hands and watched as she lit a match and dropped it into the charcoal stove.
“The girl... She was there too. In the camp.” My face started to burn and I couldn’t tell if it was from the heat of the fire or from my words. “That’s where I got to know her. Huay and another woman. Jeomsun. They were my friends. We were—”
“Auntie Tin is coming this afternoon,” my mother said, working the fire roughly, making it spit. I took a deep breath to continue but she turned around and said, “Don’t.
“Don’t tell anyone. Not me or your father or any of the neighbors. Especially not your future husband, no matter how kind you think he is. No one must know. You need to forget her, Huay, and the other girl. They didn’t exist. You understand?” She reached out and I backed away, thinking she was going to strike me. But she gripped my arm and pulled me forward, as if trying to shake me awake. “Understand? It’s for your own good.”
I nodded then wiped my face, rubbing the wet between my fingers until my hand became clammy, then damp.
“Why don’t you go wash up? You need to look nice for Auntie Tin.”
I nodded again but went to bed instead. Remained lying there until the matchmaker arrived, just after breakfast. My mother had to come and get me, leading me out as if I were a puppet on strings.
Auntie Tin did not smile this time. “I’m not going to lie to you. It wasn’t easy but I found someone who’s interested.” She paused to look at me, knitting her brows as if to add think before you reject him. She was the first one to hold my gaze since I got home and I looked back defiantly, wondering if my eyes were still red and how much my face told. The gold and jade on her arms were gone, leaving her strangely naked. Her cheeks were thinner and there were a few strands of gray in her curled hair but she hadn’t changed otherwise. I nodded.
“He’s a bit older than you and a widower, but he’s reliable. A tailor. Hardworking. I usually don’t do this for the men but he had a picture and he gave it to me, to show you.” Auntie Tin brought a palm-sized, black-and-white photo showing a man in his thirties from the chest up. His face was open, and there was a dimple in the corner of his mouth, as if the cameraman had caught the beginning of a smile. He wore a pair of dark-rimmed glasses, but his eyes shone through them clearly, looking right into the camera. I didn’t know anything else about him but I thought I could guess what his voice might sound like. He would have stories for me—ones that I would listen to and ones that I would not be ready for until years and years later.
I nodded at Auntie Tin. “His name?”
“Soon Wei. Chia Soon Wei.”