When we emerged from the ground on the morning of 8 December, we were almost surprised to find everything still there. For much of the night we’d crouched in the bomb shelter, breathing in the smell of mud and fear, listening to the thunder of planes overhead; I expected to see evidence of the night’s terror as my father pulled me out of the bomb shelter, but nothing in our village, nothing on the surface at least, had changed. When we were back home, my mother set about making coffee and laying out the breakfast things while my father told my brothers to get ready for school—a stoicism that they had picked up from having spent their youths living from one disaster, economic or natural, to another. My brothers and I were shaky from lack of sleep but instead of snatching a few moments of quiet indoors, Yang and Meng stood outside watching thick plumes of smoke rise from the city center and waft over like dark clouds.
Later that day, a few of the neighbors came with news that the island’s airfields had been destroyed, that people in the city center had lost their homes, but my father insisted that this was hearsay. “Rumors. Nothing but rumors. We have the British on our side. More likely that the sky will fall.”
A short lull seemed to confirm this. Then a second air raid occurred, and a third.
After that, for the next six weeks, we knew little else but the sound of air-raid warnings and planes and bombs. My father led the short dash to the shelter each time, a few hundred meters beyond the attap huts, all the while looking overhead as if we would have been able to outrun a plane or a bomb if one had been heading toward us. I was in charge of keeping Yang and Meng close while my mother carried two wooden buckets, one from which we would sip during the night and one in which we took turns to relieve ourselves—there was no knowing how long we had to wait.
As the weeks went by, even as we felt the tremor of bombs sinking into the ground mere kilometers away, my father held on to the belief that the war would be over soon. It was this stern optimism and the fact that our village had, so far, escaped the air raids, that allowed Yan Ling and me to continue going to the market every day. As we walked, she relayed bits of news that she had overheard on the radio at work.
“The newscasters keep talking about how hard the soldiers are fighting the Japs and how they won’t give up. No one’s worried. Not my boss. Not my parents. Especially not my parents. All they talk about is the wedding.” It was early February and her sister was set to be married in little more than a week. “My mother was so upset when they announced the curfew last week. All day she complained, ‘What about the wedding dinner?’” Yan Ling imitated her mother, her eyebrows going up and down in dismay. “‘The restaurant has already been paid’—she’s praying for the war to be over so that they can have the wedding party.”
“But the ceremony will go on? The dinner’s not that important.”
“Not to my mother. She wants to show everyone how well my sister married—the meat, the fish, the mountains of noodles and sweets.”
“What does she think about it?” Yue Qing was only sixteen, my age, and I could not imagine leaving my family to live with someone else—a man, a stranger—that I had met just once for a half an hour.
“I heard her telling her friends that she can’t wait to leave home. I don’t blame her. I want to leave as well.” We reached the market just then and she waved goodbye before weaving her way through the morning crowd.
Even with the bombings, the market lost none of its color. Business went on, punctuated now and again by air-raid sirens, which everyone seemed determined to ignore. Behind the noise and bustle were gradual signs that things were changing: the constant buzz from the neighbors’ radios; the curfew, which meant that we had to sit in the dark for most of the night, listening to my father tell ghost stories until my brothers and I fell into fitful sleep.
As the Japanese troops swept through Malaya, more and more people fled south. I didn’t realize the full extent of the exodus to Singapore until I accompanied my mother to Chinatown one weekend. There, under the arch of the five-foot way, out of reach of traffic but amid the thick of people going in and out of shops, were whole families sitting on the floor. Mothers nursing infants. Men, young and old, squatting against the pillars as they looked out at passing cars. Outside, on the street, I saw lone figures separated from spouses or parents or siblings. There was one boy about Meng’s age—not older than ten at most—begging for coins from passersby, and scraps from a whole line of food hawkers—only to be shooed away each time. As he got closer, I saw that he had a layer of dirt on his face and neck, save for the clear track lines his tears or sweat had made along the side of his face. He seemed abandoned, had the skittish manner of a kicked puppy. As he neared, I looked down, hoping he wouldn’t come to me. When I raised my eyes again, he was gone.
There were also soldiers, mostly Indians, and ang moh from Britain and Australia, sitting on curbs. Their bandages mottled scarlet as they smoked their cigarettes down to the nub. All of them—both the soldiers and the homeless—seemed to be waiting for something, food or help or a hospital bed, and I never found out if they got any of those things. Or if they would disappear in the air raids, with no one to claim them.
“Have you noticed people in town? The new people, I mean?” I asked my father at dinner one day.
“What? Oh, you mean the refugees. Terrible. But don’t worry. Once the war is over, the police will take care of things again. It will all go back to normal, you’ll see.”
Days away from mid-February, Yan Ling’s mother sent her on a trip to Chinatown, a monthly errand—part duty, part treat—that I accompanied her on, usually to procure things we couldn’t get from our neighborhood market: herbs from the medicine hall or scrap cloth from a tailor they were friendly with. This time, her orders were all for the wedding. While she bought a packet of fragrant Oolong for the tea ceremony, then a box of rouge for her sister from the beauty store, I wandered the narrow aisles, picking up one glass bottle then another and looking through the amber bottles to try to see how the world might look like with different eyes. We were exiting the store when Yan Ling showed me the two coins in her palm. “My mother said I could keep the change.” Two cents could buy us a bag of iced gems that could last us a few days or two shaved ices that would last minutes.
“First, I have to sell these,” I said, lifting my basket to show her how heavy it was with produce.
It was while we were in Trengganu Street, pushing through the sweaty market crowd, that the sirens wound up, wailing higher and louder than I had ever heard them. All around us, stall owners packed up and their customers abandoned their half-finished meals to get to their feet. Mothers picked up their children while housekeepers with bunned and netted hair scattered into the alleyways. Neither Yan Ling nor I were familiar enough with Chinatown to know where to go—not in a snap; so we stood, watching to see who went where. As we did, a plane crossed overhead and I looked up. It was flying so low that the pilot’s face was starkly visible. He was a young Japanese man, little older than I was, and his face was so serene he could have been someone, anyone, driving his new car down a freshly laid road. I was thinking this, face tilted skyward, when Yan Ling took my arm and shook me, making me drop my basket. Five eggs rolled out and cracked on the tarmac, spilling their yellow insides.
“What are you doing? Run!”
Yan Ling pulled me along, through a crush of people coming our way, trying to avoid rickshaws and cars recklessly tearing down the street. We saw a crowd surging toward the entrance of a shelter, barred by the linked arms of two white men, their pinstriped shirts drenched through, ties askew.
A voice rang out, high-pitched, despairing. “They’re not letting us in!”
“It’s only for the ang moh,” someone else cried. “It’s no use.”
The next air-raid shelter was full, the way leading down into it choking with civilians and the stench of sweat. So was the next. The streets were starting to empty. As we retreated into the five-foot way pressing close to the shuttered shops, I heard someone singing, “The bombs are coming, the bombs are coming.” The singer, mad or drunk, zigzagged into view before wandering ahead, his voice sailing up, cracking through the scream of the siren.
“Should we turn back and run home?” I asked. But Yan Ling only held on to my wrist, squeezing it tight, then tighter still.
“Here, in here!” There was a woman waving at us from halfway behind a shutter, just a few shops down. I thanked her as we squeezed past, into pitch-black and quiet, and settled down onto the concrete floor. Someone struck a match and lit candles, passing the light from hand to hand until all four corners of the room were lit. There were tables all around, and chairs pushed back from them. Underneath the tabletops crouched men, women, and children. I counted about fifty. After some minutes, we heard a long, ghostly whistle, then the thunder of something like god striking ground close by. The building shuddered. Pots and pans clattered onto the kitchen floor in the back and the jars of chopsticks on each table crashed to the floor, dispensing all of their contents. Throughout all of this, no one made a sound, not even the infants nestled in the crooks of arms.
“Are you okay?” Yan Ling whispered. I looked at her for the first time since we stopped running and noticed that there was a bloodied gash across her forearm.
“You’re hurt,” I said.
Without a word, an elderly man closest to the kitchen slipped away and came out again, tiptoeing between groups of people to hand her a dampened tea towel. “Here, you should clean it. We don’t have any iodine in here or I would have given it to you.”
“Thank you,” she said, wincing as she applied the towel to the cut.
All around us, people were starting to whisper.
“I should have left the island when I got the chance.”
“And go where? It’s not safe off the island. The British care about what happens to Singapore. We’re not some far-flung little kampong up in the north, we’re actually important. I heard they’re going to deploy more ships. And not just the English, the Australians—”
“You should all wake up. They’re losing. We are losing.” Everyone turned to stare at a man sitting in the middle of the room. His face was thin, pale and he had a pair of wire-rimmed glasses tucked into his shirt pocket. “Why would they bother protecting this island anyway? They have their own country to defend. Most of them, the ang moh who used to live here, have gone back. They started leaving the minute the Japanese landed in Malaya.” His face reddened as he finished speaking, as if he had not meant to and was astonished at the sound of his voice in the enclosed space. He looked down, took his glasses out of his pocket and started polishing the lenses with a handkerchief.
The people in the room murmured, some nodding, some turning away to whisper sharply to their neighbors. More planes overhead. Then another round of bombing, this time farther away.
By the time it felt safe to leave, it was late in the afternoon. It was only when I stepped out that I saw the caved-in building to the left of us, just a street away. There was still smoke rising from within the rubble and as we approached, I saw people sitting among the piles of rock, like wildlife caught in traps. An ambulance waited, the red cross on it shiny, as if painted on minutes ago, while three first-aid workers pointed at different spots in the debris and argued about where to begin digging. Close to them, a row of civilians looked on with white handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths and noses, and I wondered if this was their home, if it used to belong to them, the stone and soot of it, spilling out into the road. We passed a few more shophouses that had been hit, all of their insides exposed, bricks spat out like poison.
A little farther up, on Temple Street, rickshaws had been scattered, as if swept around by a giant hand. There was a sound like a constant wail, a smaller siren that had continued sounding its alarm. Then I saw it, a woman my mother’s age, squatting in the middle of the road. Her mouth was open in a howl and she had her arms extended toward a doll. I blinked. Not a doll; it was a boy of about five, on the ground. He was wearing a short sarong around his waist, had his arms spread out as if in sleep. There was nothing, no sign of injury except around his mouth, a splash of blood like a dark strawberry birthmark. His hair was swept back off his face, as if combed and set lovingly by an adult hand. I waited and waited for him to stir and crawl to his feet but he didn’t.
“Don’t look,” Yan Ling said, pulling me away, turning my head with her hands. “Don’t look.”
Against all common sense, our neighbors went ahead with the wedding despite the daily air raids. Only a small cluster of people gathered outside Yan Ling’s home to watch Yue Qing leave her childhood home. She was dressed entirely in red; her veil was so heavily embroidered that she stumbled a couple of times even with Auntie Tin’s help. I held my breath until she was seated inside the waiting rickshaw. As she was led away, Meng turned to me. “Jie-jie,” sister, he said. “Are you going to get married like this one day?” I laughed and nudged him toward the direction of home.
The wedding dinner had to be canceled because of the curfew. The day after the ceremony, Mrs. Yap went from house to house, distributing cuts of meat and noodles that the restaurant had divided into takeaway boxes. It was the best meal that we’d had in years and would be the best meal that I was to have for years to come.
That day, as Mrs. Yap gushed about the ceremony to my mother, I went outside to join Yang, who was leaning against the wall of the hut. He was watching the sky for planes, something that he’d started doing ever since the first air raid. We stood side-by-side for a few minutes in silence until he said, “I haven’t seen any of the ang moh’s planes for days. Only the Japanese ones.”
I shook my head, uncomprehending.
He made an impatient click with his tongue. “Ever since the war started, I’ve seen mainly Allied planes flying overhead—Brewsters, barrel-shaped with short wings, and Hurricanes, fighter planes that look sleeker. But lately my friends and I have only spotted Japanese planes. You can pick them out easily, not that you have much time to—you’d be in trouble if you stayed still instead of running—but they have red circles under their wings and on the sides of their bodies, the same red circle that’s on the Japanese flag.” He looked up again. “I’ve only seen their planes in the past few days. No others.”
They took the city quickly. Overnight, it seemed. The way it went reminded me of the time stray dogs broke into our chicken coop and I lay in bed, blinking awake, knowing something had changed while we were all asleep. The rooster hadn’t woken us up that morning and the air was still, unpunctuated by soft bird sound. When I entered the yard to collect the eggs, I found just one hen, half dead, its wings torn into a new shape, and called for my father. There was nothing left to do but watch as he picked it up gently in both hands and snapped its neck. That night, my mother put the cheapest parts of the chicken—its throat and back—into a soup. The rest she sold, then bought three chicks to replace the ones we lost.
This time, again, it was the quiet that hinted at what was to come. It was the first morning of the Lunar New Year but the only thing that came to mind as I woke was that we had slept through the night—an entire night uninterrupted by the wail of sirens or the whirl of planes above us. It was the quietest New Year I had ever known. No firecrackers or the distant music of dancers visiting the wealthier neighborhoods with their white-and-gold lion costumes. No children going from door to door wishing their neighbors a happy New Year, smiling wide in anticipation of an ang bao filled with a coin or two. The night before, we had dressed ourselves in our cleanest, newest clothes, eaten reunion dinner without much comment, and wished my parents happy New Year at midnight. My mother had given each of us an ang bao and I had pressed my fingers around the edge of the coin within until the red envelope tore.
The quiet persisted throughout breakfast. As soon as my father had finished, he got up and headed for the door.
“I think I’ll go and see if I can get some news,” he said, jerking his chin toward the direction of the village elder’s home. “Maybe it’s over. Maybe the ang moh got rid of them.” He tried to sound hopeful but the cords of muscle in each side of his jaw twitched as he clenched and unclenched his teeth. “Why don’t you make some tang yuan? I’ll be back in time for lunch.”
As we waited, my brothers and I rolled uneven, marble-sized globes of glutinous rice dough and lined them up on the table as a pot of sweet ginger syrup simmered above the charcoal fire. We worked silently, letting our hands move along to their own spell, all the while keeping an ear and eye out for my father.
He returned an hour later, just as we were done washing our hands and wiping off the table. My father pressed the top of his head with a flat hand, smoothing his gray hair forward. I knew what was coming but strained to hear it anyway. His voice was so soft the bubbling from the pot almost drowned him out.
“They’ve surrendered. The Japanese have taken over.”
They renamed the island Syonan-to and pushed the clock forward an hour so that we were on the same time zone as Tokyo. For us, the people living away from the city center, there was little change. A different currency. A different flag. Superficial things.
That first week, a neighbor stopped by to talk to my father. “Aiya—first we had the British, now we have the Japanese. This is just a handing over of power. Nothing more.” The man shook his head.
My father’s face was turned away from me but as he responded with a tight, wry laugh, I could picture his eyes—cold, unconvinced.
“At least the bombings have stopped,” the neighbor said as he left.
At the end of February, we were all at home when we heard a voice, tinny and faint at first, that grew louder over the course of minutes. From the window, I saw a man in plain clothes, walking up the street with a loudspeaker held to his mouth. “All men aged eighteen to fifty must report to the police station at nine in the morning. Failure to show up will result in heavy punishment.” He said this in Mandarin first, then repeated it in various dialects, passing the houses in an easy stroll, as if he were the rag-and-bone man drawing attention to his trade.
My father left just after dawn the next day, saying he couldn’t bear to sit around and wait and that it was a long walk anyway. My mother made him take a change of clothing and some boiled rice wrapped in banana leaf, all bundled up in a square of cloth, and wept as he left.
She wept again when he came home that evening, his face dark and lined, as if he had aged years in the course of a single day. The first thing he did was to take his shirt off and lay it on the dresser. There were marks on the left sleeve, slightly smudged, but it was evident that they were characters in Japanese.
“Don’t wash this,” he told my mother, looking at me to ensure that I heard him as well. “Make sure the stamp remains on the sleeve.” Then he went to the large basin and washed his face, letting the water drench his arms and undervest, yellowed from age.
The only thing my father said at dinner was this: “It’s a good thing Yang and Meng are still children.” Yang was fifteen and looked it, while Meng, at ten, was small for his age.
For the next few months, my father would wear the shirt every time he left home, even if only to go to the public tap for water. When it became unbearably soiled, he took a pair of scissors to the sleeve, cut out a square of cloth with the Japanese symbol on it, and wore it pinned to his chest whenever he stepped out of the house. After the war, my mother found it tucked into the pocket of one of his trousers. She put it into the bucket we used for burning offerings to the dead and watched as the fire slowly took it.
That night, I listened to my parents talk when they believed that we had all fallen asleep. It was the first time I’d heard my father whisper and I only caught slivers of conversation through the curtain that separated their sleeping area from mine and the boys’. His words merged with my half-formed dreams so that I woke in the morning heavy with dread.
“I had the strangest nightmare, Ma,” I began when I sat down at the kitchen table.
My mother pinched her lips together as I described it to her—soldiers, hooded figures with pointing fingers, lines of men being led onto trucks.
“No dream,” she said, when I was finished. “They took half the men at the reporting station. Half of them. Put them onto trucks and now they’re god-knows-where. A number of our neighbors were taken. The Tiongs, both father and son, and the Tans, and that man who owns the pig farm. They’re going after the business owners, and those who work for the British... At least that’s what your father said.”
“The Tiongs? You mean Mr. Tiong next door? But they’re not business owners. They’re like us.” I gestured around our home the way my father had a few weeks ago, pointing out the dignified squalor surrounding us—the hand-sewn curtains, the one, seldom-used candle that lit up the hut when dusk fell.
“I know, that’s what I said to your father. He told me they were picked out from the line by someone wearing a hood. Holes cut out for the eyes...like an executioner. Choy choy choy,” my mother spat. “I shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, no one knows where they are. Anything can happen.”
She turned away to light the fire under the pot of congee. “Don’t let your father know that I told you this. He already left for work because he couldn’t sleep.”
At 10:00 a.m., my father returned home. “The store is closed. I waited for an hour and asked the other shop owners in the street but no one knows anything.”
He tried again that afternoon, then every single day for the next two weeks until one morning he arrived to find all the stock—chairs and tables and cabinets that he had lovingly sanded and oiled—thrown outside in a heap and the shop shuttered and chained. There was talk that his boss had been taken away during the roundups (the sook ching, or purge, as it came to be called years later) for donating to China’s resistance efforts. There was no notice, no one to go to with his questions, so he gave up and started looking for a new job. My father never found out what had happened to him.
It was this need to put rice in our bowls again that pushed our family routine back to what it was before the invasion. My mother resumed her laundry rounds, and I went to the market with my eggs and vegetables for the first time in a month. The night before, my father instructed the both of us to keep our heads down and bow to each and every soldier we came across. He repeated this again as we left home early the next morning, but it seemed little had changed until we approached town. There were barricades at every turn. At each one, sentries rifled through my basket, then waved me away. The closer we got to the center, the more I saw of them. Soldiers, passing in their cars. Soldiers, inside jewelry shops and tailor’s getting measured for suits. Walking in pairs, making sure everyone—especially the men—looked compliant enough. I kept my head down and stared at their boots, only looking up once I was clear of them. My first day back in town made me feel like I’d entered another country. Out of almost every window hung makeshift Japanese flags cut from white dust cloths. The red and white of the flags, the sound of cloth flapping in the breeze, all of this gave the street the outward appearance of a parade, and it only served to make the unnatural hush seem even sharper, more malevolent.
I was never there for long. An hour in and all of my produce would be bought up. The eggs were always the first to go. I didn’t know it but the other market stalls and grocery shops, the ones that relied on deliveries from the shipyard along the Singapore river, were suffering, their stock thinning as the warehouses in the city emptied.
It was in March when the first of the soldiers came. There had been murmurs, talk about them going from village to village, taking whatever they wanted—mostly food and supplies. I had heard enough from passing neighbors and the nervous whispers between my parents late at night to know that it was a near certainty. I didn’t know, not then, that they had sacked an entire village during the invasion. That they had stormed Alexandra Hospital the day before the British surrender, had raged through the buildings, going from room to room, drunk on bloodlust, shooting and bayoneting doctors, nurses, and patients. Even those lying on the operating tables had not been spared.
I didn’t know it that morning so I was fearful but darkly curious when I saw their vehicles approach, telling myself that my over-wild imagination created scenarios far worse than what could happen in reality. I soon learned that I was wrong, of course.
The entire kampong fell silent as the trucks came up the road. Even the dogs—wild ones that roamed the village, scrappy things that barked and howled at anything, a falling branch, a shout—even the dogs fell silent at the approach of the trucks. No one spoke until a mechanical whine cracked through the air. A loudspeaker being turned on. There was the sound of a throat being cleared, then a male voice. This time, the man spoke Chinese and Hokkien, and interpreted now and again for the Japanese. “Everyone—men, women, children—gather outside right away!”
“Stay behind me,” my father said as the truck stopped close to our hut. “And bow. Bow deeply. Don’t look up. Whatever you do.”
My father unlocked the door and made us trail behind him. “Keep bowing,” he reminded us.
I did as I was told. From that angle, I saw their boots, laces fraying at the ends, daubed with mud.
“Get into a single line! Closer, closer!”
While most of the soldiers went into our homes, two of them kept guard, pacing in front of us. I stayed bowed the entire time but the shine of wood caught my eye—it was the wooden end of a rifle and it had a delicate inscription carved into the grain. I watched it as it moved from left to right, and back again. Then the soldier halted, spinning the rifle around so that the knife that stuck out of the barrel caught the sun, flicking light into my face.
Everyone stood still as the men worked, moving back and forth between the attap huts and the two trucks. Twenty minutes was all they needed. For twenty minutes, the air was filled with the clatter and thud of objects being thrown into the back of the trucks, the squawk of chickens being startled. There were a few shouts, then the motor sputtered to life again. We waited until the sound of the engine had faded away before straightening up and going back inside.
We returned to find boot marks trailing across the floor, all over our hut. The kitchen ransacked.
“They took everything,” my mother said, her mouth an O of shock.
All the sugar in our cupboards, all our long-grained rice. Even the flour that we had recently used for the tang yuan. All three of our hens, although they had missed one egg, hidden beneath a pile of dried grass dotted with fresh droppings. Our mosquito nets had been ripped out of the ceiling. Even the rattan mats that we slept on were gone.
To replace what we had lost, my mother accompanied me to the market the following day. While I laid out my paltry wares on sheets of newspaper, she went from shop to shop, looking increasingly anxious as she came out of each one empty-handed. Eventually, she crouched down next to me. “No one has any rice or noodles,” she said, “not even flour. Or salt.”
My mother took a deep breath and looked up and down the street. “Stay here. I’m going to talk to Mrs. Chang over there. Find out if she knows anything,” she said, and left for Auntie Chang’s porridge stall, a pushcart that I often passed.
Ten minutes later, when I was almost done with the day’s selling, I heard shouts. Someone saying please, please. Another voice barking an unfamiliar language.
The crowd moved away from the source of the noise, in my direction, and I stepped up onto the sheltered walkway to get a better look. From where I was, I could see a group of soldiers two bus lengths away, descending upon a young man, yelling and slapping his face.
“Aiyo, someone forgot to bow again. Happens every day,” said a woman next to me, almost dismissively.
But the soldiers didn’t stop. One of them took out a pistol and aimed it at the man, making everyone around them step back. The crowd started to disperse. Shoppers, sellers with their carts all moved away, wanting to be elsewhere. Someone trampled on the few stalks of vegetables that remained on the newspaper I’d spread out on the ground. I stayed for as long as I could, waiting for my mother to reappear until I was shoved back along with the tide of people. I would go around the block and double back to look for her, I decided.
I turned a corner. That was when I saw the wooden poles in the ground. At first I thought it was a strange Japanese custom, a totem symbol or a marker of sorts, until I got closer. That was when I saw the heads of the men. Three of them, each spiked onto the top of a pole.
I fell backward, dropping everything, then I got up and ran, not thinking about where I was going. I ran, only slowing down when I was out of the city.
My mother was home when I arrived.
“What happened? I was looking for you.”
“I—I was looking for you too. Ended up walking another way home. My basket. I lost my basket,” I said, reaching into my pockets to check for the coins I’d earned that morning. Still there.
“I’m just glad you got home safe. Are you okay?” She made a movement as if to take my arm, but stopped and showed me what she had in her shopping basket instead: a bag of flour that would make enough noodles for one meal and little more, and a packet of salt that fit in the palm of her hand. “Hardly anything left in the shops. No rice or sugar. I got this bit of flour for five times the usual price.”
Soon after, we found out that deliveries had been dwindling ever since the Japanese raised their flag over Singapore. The limited farmland on the island could only yield so much—most of what was produced went to the Japanese army, who had, in the three weeks since the takeover, laid claim to everything. Rice, the most precious edible commodity, was being diverted from our warehouses to their army kitchens and stores. What was left—broken grains, mostly—they dealt out to the rest of us. My father would receive a ration card that week and with it we would be able to buy rice, flour, sugar, and salt once a month. All of which would dwindle until my father was bringing home mere fractions of what we needed, and my mother had to make do with drawing salt from dried shrimp and old jars of pickled mustard greens, and substituting the bulk of our food with tapioca, which flourished even in the hard ground behind our home.
Over dinner, my mother talked about what she had seen at the market. “I heard the man was trying to get some rice. He tried to steal some when he found that they had raised the price in all the shops.”
My father looked at Meng and Yang, pointing his chopsticks at them. “You boys be careful. The Japanese police caught looters this week, punished them. And as if that wasn’t enough, I heard they displayed the looters in town.”
I looked up then and the sudden movement made my father turn to me. “What? Did you see something?”
Much later on, I often thought about what would have happened if I had told them what I’d seen that day. How the heads had still looked like they belonged to someone, and the blood had attracted swarms of flies so thick their hum seemed to breathe life back into the men. How there had been mud in one’s hair, as if it had been kicked about in the dirt for fun. And the littlest of mercies: their shut eyes. I wondered if it would have made a difference, if my telling them about this horror, witnessed up close, would have propelled my family into exercising more caution. But I didn’t say anything. Not that day.