A month after we found Wang Di Ah Por (different from what I call my grandmother, because I didn’t want Ah Ma to think I’d replaced her), my father put down his coffee cup at breakfast and said that it was time. My eyes went to the clock on the wall but then he continued and said it was time to clear Ah Ma’s things out of the room, we couldn’t let it all sit there collecting dust.
“You’re growing up,” he said, as if seeing me for the first time in years. “You’re going to need the space for a bigger desk and a new bookshelf. Your own room.”
When breakfast was finished, the three of us went into my bedroom and started with the little things. My mother got all of Ah Ma’s clothes out of the dresser, and collected everything sitting on top of it—a comb, countless shiny, black hairpins in a chipped teacup, a tin of scented talcum powder, and various bottles of herbal oils, each for a different kind of discomfort or pain—all of them, in a box. While she did that my father stripped the bed for the last time and put her blanket and wooden pillow in a plastic bag. Once that was done, he said it would be better if we went outside, he needed the space to get the mattress out of the door. My mother and I stood at the doorway, looking at the things we had gathered and put in the living room, just a few items, really. She didn’t take up much space. When you put it all together, her belongings wouldn’t have weighed much more than she did. For a few minutes, we listened to my father grunting, shifting things about, until he said “Oh” and everything went quiet.
“Xiang? You okay? Did you hurt your back again?”
My father said nothing but he came toward us, rubbing his head and holding out a square of paper. We watched as he unfolded it and read it quickly to himself, half whispering, half breathing the words out every now and then.
“It’s a letter to Ma. From him...” We watched him read it again, his eyes going from left to right and down the page. He looked a little dazed when he was done, and tried to smile to let us know he was okay. Then he handed the letter over to my mother and went back to moving the mattress and dismantling the single wooden bed. While he did that, my mother and I sat on the sofa; I looked over her shoulder as she read it out for me.
When we were done putting everything into trash bags, I helped my father drag first the mattress, then the bedside table and the chest of drawers to the dumpster. Afterward, when I got back home, it was like going into a stranger’s room. Going in past that familiar scratched-up door and finding my things in that changed space, minus a bed and the tiny bottles of ointment that Ah Ma used to scatter around the room. Minus her.
I thought it was a good time to look at what I had done and I lined up all the tapes I had, all five of them, on my bed. Each one had a different label on the front.
What it sounds like to be bullied.
How to know when Pa is going into his Dark Place.
What Ah Ma said.
What I found out.
Wang Di Ah Por.
The last one was hardly used. I was putting it back in the tape recorder when my mother knocked on the door. It was the first time she did that, knocking, and it made me feel strange saying “yes?”
“Everything okay? How’s your holiday project coming along?”
“It’s okay, I think. I mean, I think I know how I’m going to do the show-and-tell.” Then I went on to tell her about how I was going to do it, taking bits of sound from each tape I had made and putting it all into a five-minute segment. I would make it into a story. I could picture my classmates sniggering while I gave my talk. Even Ms. Pereira might laugh, at least when she thought no one was looking. But I didn’t care. “You see? A sound story,” I said and waited for her to react. She didn’t say anything at first but when her face cracked from her smile—that was how wide her smile was—I knew it would be okay.
We brought the letter along when we visited Wang Di Ah Por the next day. This time, it was my father who read it out. As he read, she closed her eyes to listen to him. When she heard her name being read out, her eyes flew open like someone shocked awake, but happy (the way I wake up on Saturday and Sunday mornings, much too early, before realizing that I can go back to sleep).
Lim Mui Joo,
Thank you for writing to me and for your well wishes.
Perhaps this sounds strange but there is something familiar about you (your name? the way you write/speak?) that makes me think we might have known each other in this life (or the last). Life has surprised me so much these past few years that I discount nothing these days. I received a few messages as a result of the notices I put up. None of them have led me to finding my family but almost all of them have led me to kindness. One of them led me to a matchmaker who introduced me to my new wife. Wang Di was also affected by the war. She still has nightmares and wakes up from them in the night. I don’t know how to help her and I can’t as long as there are things I have not come to terms with myself. My belief is time will help. I can only wait.
I’m sorry that you’ve lost people too. I cannot imagine how hard it was for you to tell me this and I wish you all the best for your future.
Best wishes,
Chia Soon Wei
When he was done reading, my father pressed the letter into her hands and said that she should keep it. Ah Por could only nod and smile.
It was that evening that Wang Di Ah Por told me she needed my help. She said it while my father was changing a lightbulb that he saw was blown out and my mother was pretending to wash the mugs that we’d drank from, secretly checking to make sure that there was enough food in her cupboards while we talked. I had been waiting for it, I’d seen it from the way Ah Por looked—that day at the archives. So when she came to me, I told her it was a great idea and maybe we could have her story put along with the rest. We went to the national archives again that week, just the two of us. When we arrived, the person at the desk looked at us as though she thought we were lost and needed directions to somewhere else.
“Eh, wait... I recognize you. You’ve been here before. Are you looking for something?”
“We just want to ask if Ah Por, my...grandmother can come and be interviewed. You’re doing a history project, right? About the Japanese Occupation?”
“Oh, why didn’t you say so?” She was smiling as she picked up the phone on her desk. “But I’m not in charge of that. You’ll have to go to the other department and they will arrange for someone to interview you. Let me just call them to see if there’s a colleague you can speak to...” And she held out a finger to mean she wanted me to stay right there.
I told all this to Ah Por and she started to shake her head no.
“Tell her not to call anyone. I don’t want to speak to a stranger. Tell her I only want you to do the recording.”
I waved my hand to get the woman’s attention. Her eyebrows leapt up and she put her hand over the receiver of the phone. “No one’s picking up. They must be out for lunch.”
“She doesn’t want to have someone else interview her. She only wants me to do it.”
“Oh. I’m afraid that’s not... I don’t think they’ll do that. You see, it all has to be done by a professional. Someone trained to do this type of thing. The interviews will be held in a room with specialized equipment. They can’t just allow anyone to do it... How old are you anyway?”
I told Ah Por what the woman had just said and she shook her head no no no again, turned and started to walk out of the door. She didn’t slow down until we were close to the bus stop.
It was there, sitting in that empty bus stop, with the cars whizzing past much too quickly, that we decided what we would do.
I tried to be professional, like the woman said, and spent all that evening coming up with questions to ask Wang Di Ah Por. We agreed I would visit after class the following afternoon, and then every other day so I would have time to do my schoolwork. It was one of the things she always asked me after, “Have you eaten?” “Are you working hard at school?” I would say yes and she would say it was one of the most important things to do, learn to read and write.
The first thing I did upon arriving at her flat for our first interview was to decide on where to sit. The best place, I thought, would be the dinner table, or what was supposed to be it except it was covered in everything that had nothing to do with eating. I cleared the tabletop, made sure to pick two chairs that we could comfortably sit in for a long time, and arranged them so we would be facing each other. Then I placed the tape recorder right in the middle and asked Ah Por to sit because we were about to begin. That’s when she started twisting her hands together the way she does when she gets nervous, and I got nervous too, knowing how important this was for her. The feeling went away the moment I pressed the button on the recorder. I started by asking her name and then I read the first question that I had come up with: “What happened at the end of 1941?”
I had a whole list of them but after the initial question, I didn’t need to say a word. All I had to do was show up and sit across from her and press the red button on the recorder. She had been saving her story up for so long that it was all she could do to keep from bursting with it. The first time, I got there after my remedial classes and stayed for three hours. It took quite a lot out of her, all that talking. She said some of it in Chinese and some of it in Hokkien, which I didn’t always understand. These were the parts I would have to work out afterward, at home, by playing the tapes over and asking my mother. I was just about to ask if she was okay, she looked a little pale, when she asked me the same thing.
“Of course. Of course, I’m okay.”
“I was thinking if this might be just...a little too...”
But I assured her that I was fine. It was only when I got home that I felt it, the weight of all her words sitting in my chest. The only way I could feel better again was by putting it all down on paper. That was how I spent the next few weeks, interviewing her during the day, and then writing it all out in my own words, telling her story as best as I could. I didn’t think about it when I started the first chapter with the heading “Wang Di—1941”—but it looked right when I read it over. So I began all the other chapters like that. With her name, because the stories belonged to her, and the year it was set in.
It was during the third session that I noticed the changes in her flat. I could tell by how much I could stretch my arms out, it was like I could grow a little each time, more and more as the boxes and things shoved up against the wall vanished from her home. I wanted to say something, the way my mother tells me “Good job!” whenever I figure out the answer to a difficult question all on my own. I thought it would be strange though, to say something like that to someone five times my own age. So what I said instead was “I like your rug” when I saw that she had brought home a newish looking carpet and laid it out where the boxes used to be, in a heap. And “Your chairs are so comfortable” when she got rid of all the magazines and papers that had been occupying the seats by the dinner table. All she did when I said those things was smile and nod.
We were starting to near the end of her story. I knew it was near the end because she kept repeating it, to herself, mostly. “Almost done,” she would say, “almost done.” Like she was looking at a finishing line some way ahead and was walking toward it even though she was exhausted. She was telling me the part about her leaving the comfort house when she fell silent and reached out to stop the recording. She had never told this part to anyone and didn’t know if she could, she said.
“All that... Everything I just told you. Everything’s true.” Her eyes were wide and she looked like she had just realized this herself, or remembered it, right at that moment, that it had happened to her—the things she told me, had been telling me over the past few weeks. And I understood just then that she was reliving each moment while she spoke, while we sat at the table across from each other in her flat. She would have to go to bed alone that night and her dreams would be her only company.
I wanted to suggest a little break, to get her to eat the kueh that I’d brought. It would be easy, comforting. Instead, I sat there and waited until she was ready. Sometimes all you had to do to get someone to talk was to be silent.