You find things you’re not ready to see when you go looking. I was nine when Ah Ma came to live with us. My mother said that she was getting old, that it was the right thing to do with my father being the only child and Ah Ma being his only parent. She found a job soon after that and I was left alone with Ah Ma in the afternoons. It was then that I started looking inside drawers, opening doors that were meant to be shut tight. Every afternoon, I sat cross-legged at the coffee table with my schoolwork and waited for her to fall asleep in front of the radio. It was the fan and the afternoon heat that did it, made her eyes flutter-flutter until they were closed. The minute I heard her making little puffing sounds in her sleep, I would get up and go to the top cupboard in the kitchen for a handful of iced gems and switch on the TV, putting a cartoon on mute. The day I decided I was too old for daytime cartoons, I sneaked into my parents’ bedroom and looked into their bedside tables and the drawers in their large wardrobe filled with used and forgotten handbags, brown paper document holders, photo albums. Here is a list of things that made my heart thump when I found them:
These were things I’d never known existed. Like the way I read about this ugly, ancient fish, all spikes and jaw—how scientists thought that it was extinct but it wasn’t. Except I never knew about it and learning about it made me start to wonder what else I didn’t know existed. Like the thousands of books I would never finish reading (or want to), and the millions and millions of other books out there in the world that I would never even know about. And it was this not-knowing that made me sit down and want a hot drink. This not-knowing when it came to my parents; things I’d never thought about, even if they were clear as day, clear as the fact that my parents had their own parents, had their own childhoods and histories. And then one day you open a drawer and out come all the secrets that have just been sitting quiet, waiting to be found, even though you never thought about them, never suspected they existed in the first place.
It was this last thought that was pinging around my head when I went into the bedroom that day on tiptoe and crossed the invisible line that separated my side of the room from hers. As soon as I did that, I expected to hear Ah Ma scold me, asking what I was doing snooping in her things. I could still feel her in the room, had to look over my shoulder twice just to make sure I wasn’t being watched before I started. The top drawer was a mess and it took me fifteen minutes just to sort it out into different piles of objects: hairpins, numerous and ticking like armor-shelled insects; almost five dollars’ worth of loose change, which I pocketed; a bank passbook with holes punched through the front and back (meaning that the book was finished, invalid, no use to anyone anymore); palm-sized bottles of tiger balm and ointment, which stained the wood brown and red; and jumbo packs of tissues, some opened and half used. And then in the drawers below, her clothes, silky and static. Now and then, the fabric caught on the ragged ends of my bitten nails and when I pulled my hands away, threads hung on, stretching out a ghostly cobweb. In no time, the neat folds in her clean laundry, necklines perfectly centered and facing up, were messed up so I decided to take them all out. I removed two drawers’ worth of clothing, even her cotton undergarments. Nothing. For a few seconds I sat there, surrounded by a pool of gray and blue cloth, the only colors I ever saw Ah Ma wearing, wondering how I was going to get everything back the way it was supposed to look. There was just one left. The last, bottom drawer jammed halfway so I had to reach in with my arm, making the same scrabbling sounds my grandmother had made in my dream as she felt around, like a rat locked in a wooden chest. It was here that my fingers touched cardboard and I came back out with a shoebox rustling of paper. I closed my eyes as I lifted the lid. When I opened them again, I saw a bundle of letters tied together with a length of raffia and a large, well-stuffed envelope so crumpled it looked like it had been put in the wash. I tipped the envelope upside down and shook. What fell out covered most of the tiled floor, blanketed the space in between my half of the room and what was once my grandmother’s. Some of it slid away to hide under the beds and writing desk so that I had to crawl and reach for it. When I thought I had everything, I separated the contents of the envelope into two piles.
In the first pile were letter-sized rectangles of paper, with Chinese characters occupying the top three-quarters of the sheet, and English words filling the rest. There were twenty-seven sheets of paper like this, all exactly like each other, all with thick black headings. “失踪!” it said, at the top of the Chinese portion, the strokes of the characters urgently whipping through the space. My eyes skipped below to the bottom.
MISSING!
My son was lost on 12 Feb 1942. Seventeen months old. Last seen in Bukit Timah. Any information, please write to 53 Chin Chew Street.
There was a name below that and I could see where the writer had paused—at the corners and beginnings and ends of each letter—where the ink had bled all the way through to the back of the paper. Some of the notices didn’t have any corners, the top or the bottom or both, as if they had been ripped off a wall. Some still had the remnants of dried glue on the back, folded down so they wouldn’t stick onto everything they touched. I looked through all twenty-seven of them; a few had mistakes in the English crossed out by the writer, but most were printed perfectly in the kind of handwriting that would make my teacher’s face glow and fill out with satisfaction. The second pile had news clippings from years ago, torn straight from the English and Chinese language paper. There were too many for me to read through at once but the headlines stood out, thick and beetle-black. Both the clippings and the handwritten notices had the same subject. I imagined Ah Ma flipping through the paper every morning, eyes darting over the pages just in search of these words. I imagined her walking to the market, young and unrecognizable to me, tearing the handwritten notices from the wall the moment she saw them. The words 失踪 (“Missing”) rang in my ears as I riffled through all the news clippings. I found only one in English.
THOUSANDS STILL MISSING
The number of people who disappeared during the Japanese Occupation and remain unfound is estimated to be in the thousands. To this end, the Colony has established a department to help trace the whereabouts of those reported missing during the war. Relatives of those missing may submit an inquiry at the Missing Persons Department located within the old Supreme Court building within business hours during the week. The department is also in charge of referring cases to the police when foul play is suspected.
After reading the article, I untied the raffia bow around the letters. Counted twenty-two, all of them in small, sealed envelopes. A couple had stamps on them, but not the rest. There were no postmarks on any of them. The address, always the same, was written in Ah Ma’s hand and it made me think about the first time I saw her write, how surprised I was when I saw her lined, sun-stained hands cradle the pen the way someone might cradle a fine blade, how her words curled onto the page, round and smooth. I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t thinking about it when I slipped out the first letter, the one at the bottom of the stack. I wasn’t thinking about it when I pushed my forefinger into a gap in the seal and tore it open. No one would know, I thought. And I was right, no one could know that it wasn’t already opened when it was all found out, months later. I would open just one, I told myself. Just this one. I took the letter out. It was light and almost see-through, like a single leaf pressed within the pages of a book and forgotten about for years and years. The letter was folded into thirds and it crackled under my fingers as I smoothed it out.