Time is a funny thing. Or time is relative, like I read somewhere. A relatively funny thing—how it speeds by when you have something to look forward to or when you need to get something done desperately (like trying to finish forgotten homework on a Sunday night by the light of a torch under your blanket, or when your Chinese-language teacher catches you in a lie and you have to see her at remedial class in a couple weeks). How it slows down when you have nothing to do. Especially when you have nothing to look forward to, to see how close you’re getting. Like walking in a big empty field and never getting to the edge of it. When you have both of that, both wanting and not wanting for minutes to go by, time wobbles. If I squeeze my eyes shut I can almost see it, moving in front of my eyes and under my eyelids in a white wave.
This was how time went for the next two weeks: slowly, when I was alone during the day, then much too quickly once the sun had set. I wanted time to keep still, for night to stop tipping over into morning, but it kept on ticking and tipping and ticking, until my two weeks were up and it was the Sunday before the start of remedial week. I acted as if it were like any other Sunday, that it wasn’t the day before End Times, and accompanied my mother to the market. I was waiting for her at the aquarium stall when Albert sauntered up next to me. There was a cobalt-and-crimson Siamese fighting fish, with a tail longer and wider than its body. Fanned out, the fish filled up most of the space, no bigger than a coffee can. I was watching it and ignoring Albert when he started tapping on the tank, making it dart and peck at his finger each time it met the glass.
Before, I would not have said anything. Would have walked off, or pretended that I wasn’t bothered by how he was taunting the creature. Instead of shrinking away though, I remembered the way Albert had sat outside his flat for hours, begging to be let back home. One night his mother had left him there as, one by one, all the lights in the building opposite went out. It was close to bedtime when Ma went over to talk to Mrs. Goh. Before he went back in, Albert had looked at my mother with a mixture of gratitude and fury—as if he hated being seen like that, his face puffed and shiny from his tears. Sometimes this was who I saw. Not Albert the class bully, but Albert who was sometimes made to kneel outside, who came to school with cuts from the bamboo cane all over his arms and was sometimes made to chew a handful of bird’s-eyes chili for speaking out of turn. After all that had happened last week, I saw him for who he was—no more than a child, like me, subject to the whims of the adults around us, to the world. We knew nothing.
“Stop that,” I told him now.
“Stop what?” But he did, putting his hands in his pockets. I waited for him to start shouting names at me. Instead he continued standing next to me. I saw his glance sweep the top row of goldfish, then down to the little mud-colored ones at the bottom, meant to be dropped into the tanks of predatory fish as live feed, and I knew that he was reading the names. Arowana, kissing gourami, guppy.
After a minute he asked, “Did you finish your homework for Laoshi?”
It took me two seconds to get over my surprise but I said no, there was so much. I’d only done half.
“Me too... I hope she doesn’t get too mad. She’s scary.”
I could only nod. His mother came over then, her arms weighed down with plastic bags, two of Albert’s siblings at her side. He turned to me and waved goodbye, slapping his flip-flops hard against the wet floor so that brown water splashed up around our feet.
Monday arrived. I had been up half the night dreading the alarm clock. It felt like I had just fallen asleep when it started to beep and I pressed the snooze button so many times that my mother had to come in and pull the covers from me.
When the van pulled up in front of the school gates, I had expected Laoshi to be standing by the main entrance, arms folded and waiting for my parents to drop me off, or for her to call me out the minute she stepped into class. Neither of those things happened. She didn’t even look at me. Not once. Not when we did listening exercises and dictation, not even when it was my turn to read aloud a paragraph of text. I made mistakes, tripping on words, skipping some entirely because I couldn’t identify the characters, but she corrected me, calmly, quietly, as she paced back and forth in front of the room. When I sat back down, I started wondering if it had even occurred in the first place. Maybe it was all in my head—my grandmother’s confession, the letters, me going to Laoshi for help.
I had almost made it until the end of the morning, was packing my bag when it happened.
“Lim Wei Han, please stay behind after class,” she said, scribbling something in her notebook.
This is it, I thought, hoping it would be over quickly, whatever it was. A caning. Or writing I will not lie a thousand times. I would gladly take any punishment as long as it did not involve phoning my parents. Please, Ah Ma, I thought, do this for me and I will get you your favorite kueh every Sunday for the rest of my life. I waited for everyone to leave the room before I went up to Laoshi with my head bowed, fingers braided behind my back. Looking sorry always helped.
A rustle. She’s getting her ruler out, I thought.
“Here.”
I looked up to see her holding out a plastic folder. Flapping it in her impatience.
“Go on, take it. And close your mouth.”
I could see the lightly-yellowed paper through the clear plastic, the decades-old creases in it now almost smoothed out.
I think I said thank you. I’m not sure I did.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to find out and I don’t want to know,” she said, one foot already out the door, “but the national archives might be useful. They have a website and a good search engine. It’s all in there.” She pointed at the folder I was clutching to my chest. Then she was gone.
The library was cool and absolutely silent. The only other people in there, besides the librarian, were two girls, sitting in front of a book about dog breeds, turning the thick pages together.
I took a seat at the other end of the reading table and got everything out of the folder. Something felt different. I turned the first page and saw that there was a sheet of foolscap tucked behind it, brand-new and crisp clean. The words on it were in English, written in Laoshi’s flowing script. I flipped through the rest of it and saw that she had inserted her translations after each letter. I read all of it. All the way to the end. It was only then that I found the last page, one that I had overlooked. It had been written on the back of the original letter.
“Oh,” I said out loud, making the two girls and the librarian look up; the librarian put her index finger to her lips.
The ink on this latest letter was bright blue and new. This was the last letter Ah Ma had written. After I was done reading, I went to the computer terminal, typing in the web address that Laoshi had written down for me. In the search bracket, I typed in Chia Soon Wei and pressed Enter. The screen blinked, then, 6 Audiovisual and Sound Recordings. I clicked on the first link. It took me through to a page with information about the content: the date—26/02/1983; what it was—audio recording; what it was about—Interview with Chia Soon Wei On His Experiences During the War. Below, in the synopsis bracket: Mr. Chia Soon Wei, whose family was massacred by the Japanese during World War II, recounts his experiences during that traumatic period.
But there was nothing I could click on to listen to it. Instead, it said, No preview available. Contact us to request for access to the full recording.
I clicked on all six links. None of them provided a clip that I could listen to. When I clicked on Contact us the screen blinked again and sent me to a page with a telephone number and an address. I copied everything down in my notebook. When I stopped and looked around me, the girls were gone and it was beginning to get dark outside.
“It’s going to rain, boy. Better leave now if you want to stay dry,” said the librarian.
I got up, shoving everything into my bag. I had to run.