An endless whoosh-whoosh in the depths of my pocket, and some more when you think you’ve heard enough. Then when you’ve gotten used to the whooshes, the sound almost becoming a sea-sound, a wash of noise you can fall asleep to, you hear the voices.
Sometimes it’s Albert and his friends, calling out for me, except instead of shouting my name, they shout words like chao ah gua and retard and sissy. The first time I turned around to see who it was, Albert nearly went purple laughing. Most of it, most of what they do, cannot be captured on tape. Things like standing behind me at morning assembly and spitting in my hair when we are all reciting the pledge, yelling, “We, the citizens of SingaPORE, PLEdge ourselves as one united PEOPLE,” so that the Ps land wet on my neck. Things like stepping on the backs of my shoes so that I lose one and they start kicking it to each other, making a game of it. Things like that. Once, they kicked a soccer ball at me. When I play the tape back, I can hear the smack of it against my head. But mostly there’s the whoosh-whoosh of me going to the little garden near the school’s back gate, then a hush when I sit down and eat my lunch. The shush of the afternoon rain against the ground or a window, which I recorded hours of, trying to get the rumble of thunder on tape, except it’s usually so low and far away that it never gets captured (although I think I can hear it if I strain hard enough—a ghost of a sound). You can hear the school bell ringing but you can’t feel the hurt of it on my ears through my pocket, all the way from that little tape. The sour little pinch of being quickly forgotten by David, my best friend from primary school. Forgotten because my grades were too crap for me to get an Elite Secondary Education (not that my parents would have the money to pay for it even if I did) like he is getting. Of our phone calls getting shorter and shorter because David is too busy hanging out with his new friends, while my only companions during lunchtime are the koi in the fish pond. This would be something he would have liked—the tape recorder. I can imagine how we would have messed about saying stupid things into it just to hear how our voices sounded—exactly like us and nothing like us at the same time. But it is no fun when there is no one else to listen to your own crazy words with you so I put the recorder on when I need to, when there’s something that needs remembering. People say things all the time without thinking and then they forget about it (like David, when he said we would keep on going to the arcade every Friday afternoon, like we used to). Then when it comes up again I can play it back to them and say “Remember? this is what you said,” and “See, I told you,” and “Hear that, you were raising your voice after all,” because sometimes people (my parents) don’t realize they are shouting and I have to put my hands over my ears, which only makes them louder still. It’s like their ears are switched off to their own voices. Other times, I put the recorder on when there are important things I need to remember. Like what my parents talk about in the van when they think I’m asleep in the back (“I think we had him too late.” “What? No, lah.” “I’m just worried. You know, sometimes I don’t understand half his homework.”); the thing Ah Ma—my grandmother—said to me just before she died (“I found you! Pease don’t baneme... I foundyou and tookyouawaay.”).
I started recording things partly because of Ah Ma and partly because the optician told me that I was going to go blind. He said it when I was done reading the letters on the chart. It didn’t take long. I climbed up onto the big chair and covered first my left, then my right eye with a piece of cardboard. With each eye, I got as far as the first letter at the top, E, and only because I remembered it from the times before. In fact, I couldn’t see any of the letters. I couldn’t even see the edge of the poster where it met the wall.
The optician said it again in front of my mother, when we were out in the bright business part of the shop, with the rows and rows of glasses looking out at us, all of them winking in the light. “Keep it up and you’ll go blind, little boy,” he said and smiled; he wasn’t even going to try to hide the dollar signs in his eyes.
I wanted to ask “Keep what up?” but my mother was already saying how could it be possible when I had my prescription changed just last year.
“Less than a year ago, wasn’t it, Kevin?”
I lifted my shoulders up the way my father did whenever she asked him what he wanted for dinner.
“What is it now? Minus what? Seven?”
“Seven point five. Both eyes.”
“At least they’re the same. Balanced,” I said.
My mother looked at me and then back at the man. She leaned forward and whispered, as if sitting farther away from me and lowering her voice meant that I wouldn’t hear her.
“But he’s only twelve! He’s not really going blind... Is he?”
“I’m almost thirteen!” I corrected her. Twelve years and seven months, to be precise. But both of them ignored me.
“No, lah, miss,” said the glasses man, trying to flatter my mother. “Joking only, joking only.” He was still smiling.
My mother did not smile back. She looked exactly the way she did when she had to go to school to talk to my form teacher, after the school nurse saw the bruises on my legs—blots of black and purple and yellow—and pointed out the one on my back during the annual checkup.
I was only eight years old then, and my form teacher was one of those who felt that she had to bend down to talk to her students. The lower she bent the sorrier she felt for them, I realized. The teacher was almost squatting when she said, “How did you get them?”
“I don’t remember except for that one.” I pointed to the one near the hilly bumps of my spine. “That one is from when I walked backward into a table.”
“Hmm.” She chewed the end of her Bic pen and asked again. Her voice was pillow soft and I could smell the cough drop she was hiding in her cheek. “How did you get these bruises really? Don’t worry. You can tell me.” She put a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the sweatiness of her palm even through my shirtsleeve.
I told her what I’d said before.
“Hmm,” she said again, and left to get Miss Tan.
After school, I had to wait outside the nurse’s office while both of them asked my mother questions.
They talked for a few minutes before Miss Tan opened the door. “Kevin, tell me how many fingers I’m holding up.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m ready. Hold up your fingers.”
“I am already—”
“Already what?”
When we were in the bus, my mother shook her head and said, “I thought you were just really clumsy.”
We went straight to the optician’s. Afterward, she brought me to the mini-mart close to home and told me I could pick out three items. I was so surprised when she brought me to the mamak shop below our flat and said, “You can pick any three”—meaning I could pick out no-use-things (like balloons and ice-pops and Polo sweets that I ate only because I could whistle through the hole in the middle)—that it had taken me twenty minutes to decide on a Hiro cake and two erasers, one with the English flag on it, one with the French.
That was five years ago, a lifetime. In the space of five years, I had finished primary school (though I hoped I wouldn’t have to—hoped and hoped that the millennium bug would crash all the computers so I wouldn’t have to go to my new secondary school), lost my only friend, and become an outcast in my new class. The erasers are now thumbnail-sized, and only the blue bit is left of the French flag.
Back then I could still see what faces people were making even when they weren’t sitting right next to me. Now, unless I press my face right up to whatever I’m supposed to see, everything is a smudge of cloud and color.
While I read the posters on the optician’s wall—TAKE AN EYE BREAK EVERY 40 MINUTES & LOOK AT A TREE—my mother picked out my new frames from the hundreds, thousands, lined up under the glass-top counter.
“How much is this?”
The man took out a calculator and started tapping on it. “That one, with student discount...hunnerd-twenty.”
“That one?”
Tap-tap-tap. “Hunnerd-seventy-five.”
“Anything below hundred?”
“Oh, that one lor.”
“Come, Kevin, try these on.”
She handed me a pair with plastic rims, thick, black. I removed my own glasses, then put them on. I could just make out a me-shaped blur in the mirror—a beige-yellow circle, black on top. “How does it look?” I asked, turning to face my mother.
There was a pause before she said, “We’ll take them.”
The optician coughed and rustled some papers. “And the lenses? You want high index? Better get them for strong prescriptions like his, so the lenses are not so thick.”
“How much?”
The calculator went tap-tap-tap-tap and my mother sucked in her breath. “The normal one is okay.”
When my father came home that evening, I told him that I was going blind.
He pulled his right ear and said, “Makes your ear sharp.”
At school, I’d hoped no one would notice my new glasses but of course Albert did. I had known him ever since we moved into the block but we had never been in the same class. The moment I stepped into the classroom on the first day of secondary school and saw how he had been watching me walk in, how his lip had gone up a little on one side, my stomach started to hurt.
It hurt that morning, when I looked in the mirror and saw that the glasses covered half my face. At least the bowl cut which my mother had given me was growing out. I spent ten minutes combing my hair forward to see if it would cover up the glasses, the thickness of the lenses and frames, until my mother started screaming about me missing my ride. It didn’t help that the new glasses kept sliding down my nose. Or that she’d thrust the red thermos at me in front of Albert, and in full sight of everyone on the bus, or that my breakfast congee had extra fried onions on top, stinking up the school bus when I opened up the thermos. I tried to ignore Albert when he shoved me at the steps of the bus so that he could get off first. Pretended not to hear him and his friends calling out to me, “Oi, gay boy”—“ah gua”—“retard!” But some things are harder to ignore. All of that was fine (at least that was what I tried telling myself). What was not fine was finding the cover of my maths and English workbooks scrawled with the same words, alongside cartoon mounds of shit inked in black marker. On the pages within—both blank and those filled with my own handwriting—were more drawings: a face with giant specs and rabbity teeth, which was supposed to be me, and a crude sketching of a cock and balls next to an exercise where I’d filled in all the missing verbs in a sentence.
After that, I brought my lunch (always the same: char siu rice, no cucumbers, extra chili) to the garden even though no one was supposed to. When the school janitor was there, pulling up weeds and tending to the rabbit hutch, I had to go somewhere else. Not the canteen, where they were sure to see me, so I skipped lunch and just went to the library. Once, when the library was closed for inventory, I made the food stall auntie put my lunch in a takeaway bag and brought it to the boys’ bathroom, locked myself in a cubicle and ate sitting down on the toilet seat. It was March, during one of those too-hot afternoons that made the back of my uniform stick to my chair, when Ms. Pereira told us to bring in our workbooks for the quarterly check. This is it, I thought, this is the end. I could already see it: Ms. Pereira’s nose flaring when she saw the lewd drawings, then calling my mother to talk about my “problematic behavior.” Or worse, Ms. Pereira getting the discipline master to cane me in front of the entire school at assembly. I wondered which would be worse, throwing my books into a bin and saying that I’d lost them, or getting new workbooks for all my classes and copying everything I had done so far into them. Except I couldn’t afford new ones, even skipping lunch to save up for them wouldn’t be quick enough. I did the only thing I could think of: go to my grandmother.
“Ah Ma, I need some money.”
“For what?”
“I need workbooks.”
“There’s a whole stack under the coffee table,” she said and went to look for them. My stomach started to hurt when she bent down and the knobbly bits of her spine poked through her shirt. “If not, you can go down to the convenience store. Ah Beng’s shop sells them cheap.”
“Not exercise books, Ah Ma. Workbooks. I need the one for English class. The expensive ones you can only get at the bookstore.”
“Har? Why? What do you mean? Don’t you have one already?”
That was when I told her what Albert had done. Before I was finished, she’d gotten up and hobbled over to his flat a few doors down. I heard her high voice even from the living room, snapping in my ear like a rubber band. Later that evening, I heard Albert crying as his mother whipped him with her bamboo cane. My mother had looked at Ah Ma as if to say “look what you did.”
“He drew in my workbook,” I said, showing my mother the pages. She flinched when I got to the page with the cock and balls on it before looking away.
“Just ignore him. Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you.”
That was when everything else came out, I couldn’t help it, about Albert calling me names, putting out a leg to trip me whenever I went past.
“I can’t even have lunch in the canteen because they make fun of my water bottle.”
“What’s wrong with your water bottle?”
“IT HAS THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE ON IT.”
“Boy, don’t shout at your mother,” my mother said. She breathed loudly, in and out of her nose several times before she continued. “Ignore them. They’re just jealous.”
“Jealous of what?”
“Be the mature one. You know, there are two types of heroes? The flashy ones and the quiet ones. The quiet ones grow up to become doctors and pilots and policemen.”
“I don’t think I can become a pilot,” I said, squinting at her.
“They become teachers and civil servants and vets.”
I thought about the time I had two white mice, Harry and Jane. How Jane had got pregnant. We separated them but in the end, when she had finished giving birth, I got there in time to see her pushing one baby after another—plump, raspberry pink—into her tiny mouth. My mother had screamed, but Ah Ma had simply brought the mouse back to the pet store owner at the market. Harry died a few weeks later in his food bowl, round as a tennis ball and just as firm, after overeating from heartbreak.
A year ago, when I was in the last year of primary school, my teacher had written in my report card: “Kevin is well-behaved but rather lackadaisical.” My mother had made me go to my room to get the dictionary and look up the last word.
“Lak-uh-dey-zi-kuh,” I’d read. “Without interest, vigor, or determination; listless; lethargic.”
“What? What’s that mean?” Ah Ma said and made my mother translate it for her. “Well, who’s this? Is this that keling teacher? They don’t know anything.”
“Ma!” my mother said.
“What is she, Wei Han? This teacher? Is she ang moh? Or keling? Her name sounds Indian.”
“MA, don’t use those words in front of the boy. You’re supposed to say ‘Indian.’ Keling is a bad word.” But she was looking at me, not at Ah Ma. She did this every time my grandmother said anything like that, ever since I embarrassed my mother in front of her boss, Mr. Truman, during a company dinner when I asked if he was the ang moh my mother worked for. He had laughed and said yes but my mother turned red and piled food onto my plate to stop me from talking.
“Mrs. Singh is Indian,” I said. “She brought homemade murukku to class for Deepavali.”
“I hope you didn’t eat them. Don’t know what these people put in their food. They are all the same. The Malays steal, the Indians just drink beer all day...”
“And what do the Chinese do? They just say ugly things about other people all day,” my mother muttered before turning her attention back to me and narrowing her eyes to let me know if I were to repeat any of these things to anyone, I would be in trouble.
I saw my father dart his eyes at my mother, then at Ah Ma, and dart them away again and I knew he was thinking about the Tiger beers he had after they went to bed. He had one every night, and usually many (many) more than that on Friday and Saturday nights. I didn’t have to go to bed early so I would sit and shell peanuts for him. If he was in a good mood, he would help me with my maths homework as he drank and let me tip the empty cans so that I caught the last drops with my tongue. They didn’t taste like anything, just fizz and metal. Sometimes he drank and watched TV until he fell asleep, snoring and waking everyone (except Ah Ma, who is hard of hearing). Once, next door even came to complain about the noise.
“I don’t think I can be a vet and I don’t think I want to become a teacher,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. Stop complaining about Albert. And besides, you have no proof that he drew in your book.”
“Proof?” Ah Ma said. “You want proof? Just look at that neighbor boy, you think he’s a nice child? Fat as a pig, mean as one too.” Then she went on to tell the story about how a sow had taken the hand off a child when she was living in the kampong. “We let our pigs run around the village the way people now let their dogs run around their garden. Pigs are like people—half are nice, half are devils.”
All of this, I remembered as BEFORE THE STROKE, because AFTER THE STROKE was when Everything happened. Ah Ma had her first stroke that evening just as the Chinese ten o’clock news was finishing. The newscasters were saying good-night when Ah Ma announced that she had a headache and tried to get up from the sofa. Then she fell over and couldn’t get up on her own again. While my parents lifted her onto the sofa—my father at her head and my mother at her feet—I looked on and couldn’t move, not even when my mother screamed at me to get the phone. All I could do was stare at the bottoms of my grandmother’s feet, child-sized, a callus near her right pinkie toe.
I was following them out of the door when my mother shooed me back in. “You have school tomorrow. Stay here and I’ll call with the news.” I sat on the sofa by the phone until I fell asleep. It was one in the morning when my mother shook me awake to say that my grandmother was okay—that she’d had a stroke and was all right but my father would stay with her just to make sure. The following day I took the bus to the hospital after school. When I got there, my father was fidgeting in his seat next to the bed. I could tell from the way he was tapping his fingers on his knees that he had been there for some time and had been waiting for me to arrive. Ah Ma was sitting up in bed, one corner of her lip was glistening with saliva and I was torn between wanting to give her a handkerchief and running out of the room.
Then my father got up to go to the washroom and left me alone with my grandmother. It was in those five minutes that Ah Ma said it. The thing that was going to come true later that week. As soon as we were alone, she turned to me and said, “Wei Han, listen. I’m going to die soon and when I die, you can have everything in our room.”
“Ah Ma!”
“There is money in my underwear drawer, in a biscuit tin.”
“Ah Ma!”
“Maybe you should write that down, in case you forget.”
“Ah Ma, stop!”
“And the cassette player and my tapes, you can have those as well. Go get it from my overnight bag over there. I want to show you how to use it so you don’t break it.”
She spoke slowly, putting effort into making each sound. I looked at her for the first time since the previous night and saw that one side of her face was not like the other, as if she had been tilted and left like that, leaning at an angle. I couldn’t figure out which side was the wrong one, the bad side, until I brought her the cassette player and she reached out with her left arm. Ah Ma, a righty all her life. She put it in her lap and pointed with her left index finger.
“Look. Press here to play, there to record. Remember to rewind the tapes when you’re done listening. Always rewind them. Don’t forget.” The earphones unspooled and dangled from her lap, swinging in the air.
“But those are your tapes.” I knew there were about twenty of them on her bedside table, all filled with hours and hours of Hokkien and Teochew opera. She would sit in front of the radio and when one of her favorite operas came on, she would call out, “Aiya!” and walk-run into the bedroom, arms swinging at her sides to propel her forward, and I would hear the crack of a new cassette shell being opened for the first time, the snap of the cassette deck being shut. Then she would come back out again and put the recorder next to the radio, push Record, and wave for everyone to keep quiet, a crooked finger to her mouth. At night, she slept with it on her chest as if that would make the sound of the people and instruments travel through her person and into her head. Most of the time she fell asleep with the music still whining out of the speaker and I would have to get up, feel my way over to her bed in the dark and click it off.
“It sounds like stray cats in the alley,” I had protested one morning. I had held my face above my pork congee so that my glasses steamed up and I wouldn’t have to look at my grandma while I complained about her. I said it twice, first in English, then in Mandarin. “Hao xiang mao jiao.”
My father laughed and I knew I had won. The next day, he’d gotten Ah Ma earphones for her music and she went to sleep that night with the earbuds in, the black cord of them twisted around her hand. The funny thing is, after that, it took me longer to fall asleep. Remembering this, trying to stop Ah Ma from listening to her music like that, made me want to hit myself in the face.
“But it’s yours.” My cheeks were burning from the memory of having complained about her and I couldn’t look at her in the eye.
“And it’s still mine. Until I’m dead. And don’t let it get rusty while I’m in here. I might be gone for a while.”
“Ah Ma...”
My father came out of the bathroom. “Boy, are you ready to leave?”
I waved goodbye to Ah Ma.
A few hours later, while we were having dinner, Ah Ma had her second stroke.
That night, as we waited once more in the same pink-and-white corridor, outside the same room, I asked my father when Ah Ma would be able to go home and he just looked away. That was when the doctor came out to say that we should probably prepare ourselves; it was unlikely that Ah Ma was going to improve. Then he pressed his lips together and scribbled something on his chart. His shoes made squeaking noises as he walked away from us. Instead of thinking about Ah Ma, I scrabbled around in my brain for other things to think about and came up with two. One: that I wasn’t going to be a doctor. Two: Ah Ma’s cassette player.
It was strange that night without Ah Ma hobbling around in our two-bedroom flat—the absence was solid, something we tiptoed around, pretending not to notice. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like going to sleep with an empty bed on the other side of the room but the thought of it made the dark behind my eyelids darker than black. So I stopped. Instead, I got up. The cassette player was still in my school bag from earlier that afternoon, when she’d forced it into my hands. I took it out, pressed Play, and left it on her pillow so that I could just about hear the tinny faraway sound of her music sneaking out of her earphones at the loud bits, the exciting bits, when the gongs and cymbals really got going. Then I closed my eyes again and pretended that she was there, listening to her opera, her head propped up on her wooden pillow.
The rest of the week that Ah Ma was in hospital, my parents and I talked about everything else but about her. Even when we were there, next to the bed, with the tubes going in and out of her and the machines making little beeping noises, everyone pretended that we were at home sitting around after dinner. Except there was no TV to look at, and Ah Ma was lying down instead of sitting in her usual spot in the armchair. She looked even worse than before, even less like herself. That one side of her face wasn’t just slightly crooked now, it seemed frozen, as if it didn’t belong to her.
My mother used her Hospital Voice the second we were in the ward. It was soft and an octave higher than usual; it sounded wrong, like lullabies sung outside, under the afternoon sun. It made me think something bad was going to happen (it was, it did).
“Hello, Ma,” she whispered, “how are you feeling?”
My grandmother was lying down and had to press a button to make the top of the bed fold up with a zzzng. While we watched it inch up, all I could think was I didn’t understand how she could be comfortable on the hospital pillow the way it was, soft and almost flat and covered in plastic-y cotton. I felt like asking if it might be better to bring her her wooden pillow from home.
“O-gay.” My grandmother nodded. “Eden?”
“Yes, yes, we’ve eaten. Na, soup—peanut and pig’s tail.”
My father stood by while my mother tucked a handful of paper towels down the front of Ah Ma’s hospital gown and spoon-fed her, his eyes far away.
I tried to guess what it was he might be thinking about instead. His clients? Their swimming pools? Worrying if he smelled too much of chlorine? The plants that he was growing in pots in the corridor outside our door? I stopped there. I realized I knew very little else about my own father. Then a little black thought crawled in. Maybe he was thinking about how expensive it was, a bed in a hospital. Almost a week. Maybe he was thinking it was better if—
He looked up. I stopped myself, squashing the thought dead. Like an ant under my finger.
“Kevin,” he began, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Huh?”
“You know. A job, a profession. You’re twelve years old. In secondary school. Time to start planning about what you want to do.”
“I want to become a journalist.” The thought had fallen out of my mouth as if it had been there all along, waiting and waiting for someone to ask the right question.
My mother looked up as if someone had just pinched her. She looked at my father while he rubbed his head, the way he does when he’s confused. “Oh. That’s funny... That’s what I wanted to be when I was young.”
“What happened?” I said, and wanted to take it back at once; it was as if I had just asked, THEN WHY ARE YOU A POOL CLEANER? “I mean...”
“Oh. No money to go to university. What to do...” He shrugged.
My mother was still looking at us in the way that meant like father like son and feeding Ah Ma soup at the same time.
“Like it?” my mother asked.
Ah Ma nodded and the movement spilled soup out of the not-working side of her mouth.
“Tissue, tissue!” my mother yelled, not using her Hospital Voice.
My father and I just stood there, gaping. By the time we unfroze, a nurse was at her bedside, dabbing at her face and gown. Tissues flew.
The minute the nurse went away, Ah Ma started to cry.
“What’s going to happen to Ah Ma?” I asked the question again over dinner. Rice, sambal kang kong, the soup that Ah Ma had drank and spilled.
My parents continued eating, but a bit noisier, as if wanting to drown me out.
I asked again, “What’s going to happen to Ah Ma?”
Clink, clink, clink, slurp.
I set my chopsticks across my bowl.
“What’s wrong with you? Finish your food.”
“I just want to know...”
“A little too salty, this,” my father said, poking his chopsticks in the stir-fried greens.
“It’s the sambal—the prawn paste I used in it must have been extra salty. Boy.” She turned to me. “Eat your vegetables.” She gave me a heap of kang kong, enough to bury the rice in my bowl.
My father snipped off a bit of omelet and reached across the table to drop it on top of the greens. “Na.”
That was when I realized that this was something else I wasn’t allowed to talk about. Along with “Why does Albert not have a father?” and “Does Pa not have a father? I’ve never heard you talk about him,” and “Why did you have me so late?” (This last one I found out just last year, when second aunt drank herself silly on one glass of champagne at her daughter’s wedding and rambled on about my parents having tried and tried for years to no success, and were ready to give up when pop! I came into the picture.) And these were only a number of the many things I wasn’t supposed to bring up. The problem was nobody had given me a list detailing all the forbidden topics. Lists helped to make things clear, to line up the thousand and one thoughts that I had in my head. I needed one to show me what it was I wasn’t supposed to say. The heading would go OUT OF BOUNDS or WHAT NOT TO SAY. Under that, I had my fourth entry: “The maybe-possibility that Ah Ma might die.”
Number five would be “Death, in general.”
“Boy, what are you doing? Your food’s getting cold.”
It was as if nothing was different. As if her chair wasn’t there, empty and pushed in against the table.
Finally, I said, “Do your hands feel more, after you go blind?” Because this was an okay thing to talk about and I wanted something (anything) to fill in the quiet. After I asked the question, I could hear the chairs creaking, my parents wriggling their bums as they relaxed again into their seats.
My father chewed on the end of his chopsticks for a moment before replying, “I don’t know. I guess so.”
“But doesn’t that mean that your skin feels more, and if your skin feels more maybe things hurt more? Or is it a superpower you can turn off and on?”
“I can see you pushing your food around, you know,” my mother said. “And you’re not going blind.”
That was all they talked about the rest of the dinner. I even forgot about my grandmother and the hospital, for a minute.
I decided then that this was what I should do as well. Not thinking. Not talking. I could start tonight. I would pretend that it was normal that Ah Ma wasn’t around. But I needed something to distract me. That was when I remembered what she had said and decided to pick up her cassette recorder. It was just lying on top of her bedside table, gathering dust. There were more empty cassette tapes in the drawer beneath; my father had gotten her a whole box of them because she didn’t want to or didn’t know how to rewind and record over things.
I figured I had to collect sounds to remember by if I was going to be blind. That night, I punched little holes in a piece of paper with one of my mother’s sewing needles. Then I closed my eyes and put my fingers over them. I tried and tried for minutes and felt nothing. Just maybe-bumps here and there. Maybe-bumps because I wasn’t sure if I made up feeling them or if they were really there. When that didn’t work anymore, when Ah Ma started tiptoeing around the edges of my thoughts again, the tubes stuck into the top of her wiry hand, the smell of the hospital—a kind of clean that was scarier than comforting—I reached for the recorder and spoke with my Inside Voice:
THINGS I DON’T HAVE TO SEE ANYMORE IF I GO BLIND
Ah Ma’s half-frozen face
The other sick people in her hospital room
The way Pa walks, with one hand on his back, after cleaning extra dirty pools to pay off the hospital bills
Ma, when she eats dinner with her eyes closed after doing overtime at the shipping company
Public toilets
The way the boys in my class smile all crooked when I walk past them
Laoshi’s scary hair when she doesn’t tie it up
I felt better. Just for a few minutes. I played the tape over and over again to drown out the noise of my own thoughts about Ah Ma. About what I should have said to Albert when he called me all the different things that he called me until I fell asleep.
Chinese class is four times a week, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Monday to Thursday is when Laoshi puts her hair up. On Fridays, she lets it loose and the black, thick curls fall around her face and down her back. They make her thin face look even thinner. Fridays are when she shouts about the homework she corrected during the week. The black cloud around her head shakes and trembles. White flecks of spit form at the sides of her mouth when she starts to tell us off.
“Ni zhen de shi bai chi,” she says, shouting the last two words. “Oh, you really are an idiot.” This is what she says when someone does their homework badly. Or, “Ni mei you yong tou nao—You’re not using your brain.”
She said it to me once and I was quite glad. I took it to mean she believed there was something in my head that could be put to good use, if I wanted. When there are assignments missing, she starts in on all of us even though it might be just one or two who didn’t hand in their work.
“You think I get a bonus for marking more work? Ungrateful, lazy, inconsiderate, all of you!”
She says this in English to make sure that the really weak students, the ones whose parents speak Mandarin only during Lunar New Year with distant relatives and even then just the few stock phrases wishing good luck and prosperity, understand her as well. Sometimes, after Laoshi is done shouting, she leaves the classroom, slamming the door shut behind her, and I can breathe again. No one talks or moves when she is gone because she can be back quicker than we hear her (she moves like a cat for someone so tall; she’s the tallest woman I know). Sometimes she comes back and her face is changed, the way someone’s face can be changed after they’ve been to the sink and washed the day away. Other times she comes back with her long, wooden ruler and puts it to us—not on the girls though, that isn’t allowed. Just the boys and recently, just Albert. I try not to look when the ruler makes a fat thwack on his palm because she calls you out and gives you one for looking happy as well—“What are you smiling about? Get over here.” Once or twice, she didn’t come back. The entire class simply waited in silence until the bell went and then we put our things in our backpacks, everyone moving in slow motion, in case she returned and we looked too happy to be leaving.
I was in that class on a Friday when it happened; it was the last day of school before the June holidays. She was telling us about her office hours during the break, saying that she would be around all morning from Monday to Wednesday and to come with questions if we had any, when someone knocked and put her head around the door. Laoshi went outside and there was a lot of whispering for a moment before she came back in, wearing a different sort of face. The face she had when I saw her giving a stack of textbooks to a girl who couldn’t afford them (the only one in class who was poorer than Albert and me). For a few seconds I could see what she might look like as a next door neighbor or a friend of my mother’s. She had that face on now. Instead of feeling comforted, I felt my bladder being squeezed like a water balloon.
I knew what was coming but I still jumped when she looked at me and said, “Wei Han, pack your bag. Your parents are coming to pick you up.”
Her voice was polite and even. The way she had spoken to the other teacher, but even softer. I felt everyone watching as I put my stationery and books in my backpack and I knew that Albert’s eyes were on me, hoping and hoping that I was in trouble. I would have chosen to stay if I’d known what was coming. I would have chosen to get on the school bus at the end of the day and have Albert lob paper bullets at me, or stomp on my feet, or seize whatever he took a fancy to—a packet of chocolate Hiro cake that my mother had dropped into my bag, or my pencil case. I would have happily taken the bus and then got off with him at the foot of our apartment block, have him push past me to get into the lift on his own while I waited for the next one or simply walked up six floors, all the while wishing I were taller, broader, or at least had perfect sight. I would have chosen to go through all of that each day for the rest of my time in this school, because I knew what it meant to be gently called out of class like this. I didn’t want to leave.