28 December 1945
Chia Soon Wei,
Please forgive the abruptness of my salute. I have thought about you so much that I feel I should address you like a friend or a relative. There is no suitable word between “Hello” and “Dear” to address someone I’ve never met. “Hello” and “Hi” sound like we have already been in contact for a while and you were expecting to hear from me. Or it sounds like a stranger writing to ask for something and trying to cloak the request in familiarity. Which is what I am doing, really. Isn’t it. The thing I’m asking of you? I’m asking you to let go. I’m asking you to forget.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
3 January 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
This is the fifth letter that I have started. I wrote four others, read them over and over for days, and then put them under my mattress. I don’t want you to find me but I want to tell you how it happened that day, almost four years ago.
I wasn’t even meant to be there. None of us were, but they told us that the city wasn’t safe, so we abandoned our home in the first week of December, leaving behind school and work and neighbors to move to the village. My father told us that we were moving to Bukit Timah, just to be safe, and my mother chimed in after him to say that it was only for the time being. She said it over and over again while we were packing, refusing to mention the war. Not even once. I wondered how we were all going to fit in my grandparents’ attap house, my parents, and me and my five siblings, plus my oldest brother and his wife and little boy, just over a year old, but I knew not to ask. My mother said to bring only the necessities so I put together a few sets of clothing, a hairbrush, a mirror, paper and pen, two novels, and wrapped it all in a cloth bundle. Then, a few minutes before we left for the bus, I untied the bundle and added in a few more books. I even brought homework with me. On my last day of school, my Chinese teacher made me stay behind after class. She handed me a book, Dream of the Red Chamber, the cover of it worn like cloth. It was her own copy, she said, and she wanted it back when I returned to school. As I flipped through it I saw her name on the inside of the cover, the inscription someone had written in flourishing script. She told me that I needed to go back to school as early as I could to start preparing for the senior exams the following year. I was already too old, older than the other girls in class because my parents didn’t have the money for the textbooks and the uniform and the school fees until my oldest brother started work and could contribute to the household. We’ll start preparing for the exams when this is all over, she said. When this is all over. I never started on Dream of the Red Chamber and I never saw her again. This is the first time since It happened that I’ve thought about Yeh Laoshi, about Chinese classes, which I liked the most. About school and my single set of uniform, which I had to keep studiously clean throughout the week. I remember being nervous about the senior exams, how I knew I wasn’t going to do well since there was never any time for me to study; my mother needed me at the stall and around the house. The book she lent me is back in the ground, burned and broken like the rest of my grandparents’ home. Burned and broken like everything else in the village.
Your village. Sometimes I think about how I might have passed you on the way to the market when I lived there. We might have looked up to nod a polite hello and then walked on. Sometimes, right now, I walk past someone on the street and imagine that it might be you, that I saw the boy’s smile, his eyes in the face of a passing hawker or a bus conductor. You don’t know my name but if I send you this letter, you will know me as the only other adult in that village who survived. The other person who lived, and then took from you.
I want to tell you how I came to be there, and how I survived that night. And then I want to tell you how much I need to keep the child even though I think you might be his father. But I sit here and I realize that there is nothing I can say. There is nothing to explain why I cannot return him. You lost people, just as I did. I thought I had lost everything until I found the child. I found him and kept him safe when no one else could take care of him. If I do this, if I return him to you now, I will have lost everything all over again.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
17 January 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
I think about it sometimes. How we might have lived not more than twenty paces from each other. You and your wife. Me and my family. There were twelve of us crammed into my grandparents’ attap hut. My grandparents were pleased to have us at first. A family reunion, my grandmother had said, clapping her hands together. But she got worn out quicker than she expected, I think. She tried to make the best of it but there were so many mouths and hands and voices that she started to hide in her bedroom during the day. Or maybe it was the air raids at night that did it, tired her out like that. Some people say they got used to it, running to their bomb shelters in the ground. We had ours in the back garden, lined with pieces of wood and sacks of dirt. One night, when the sirens started to cry, my grandmother refused to leave the house, saying that she would rather die in her own home than be found in a hole like an animal. She wept and held on to the leg of the dining table. Eventually, while the skies buzzed and trembled overhead, my father and grandfather dragged her out by her armpits as she wailed, her fists held to her heart like she had been stabbed. Once she was in the shelter though, she stopped. She pulled my nephew into her lap and stroked his head until the shelling ceased and we could go back into our homes.
Not that they helped us much, the shelters, did they?
I don’t know why I am alive today but I know how. I remember exactly the way I did it, hiding behind my older brother when the first shots thundered in my ears. I felt a searing pain on my leg and stepped back. No one screamed, but the circle tightened, all of us moving into each other. Then my brother stumbled, tripped over my feet and fell, taking me down with him. One by one, the others around us fell too. I closed my eyes and kept still while the soldiers came around to check, pushing their bayonets into my sister, my father. Then someone began to call out short, sharp commands. I heard the dry cracks of doors being broken down and the splintering of glass. I thought they were simply pillaging, taking food and anything else that was valuable, until I smelled the char of wood and palm leaves. We’re going to burn, I thought. But the wind was low that night. For hours, everything smoldered until only we remained. Us, and the trees around the village. I kept still until after they left, until nightfall. Then I got up, pulled myself out of that tangle of limbs and torsos. My clothes were damp and stained red-black but none of the blood was mine. I found a wound on my left calf, a graze, little more. I remember shivering and thinking that I had never felt cold like this before. I thought some of the others might be keeping still as well, just waiting for the soldiers to leave. It was only when I started to call out, and then to look, shifting the now-cold bodies of my youngest brother, my mother and my father, that I realized I was alone. I was the only one.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
19 January 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
Sometimes I forget that you exist and I forget about the letters that I’ve written until I go to bed at night and feel them crackling and shifting under the mattress, reminding me of what I have done. What I am doing.
I have only repeated the lie once. First to myself, practicing what to say if anyone questioned me. Every day, I remind myself that my name is Lim Li San. Li San. Not Mui Joo. That the child’s name is Lim Yong Xiang. The Japanese had killed my entire family. This part was true. I kept the story in my mouth for weeks, perfectly rehearsed, waiting and waiting for someone to ask me whose child this was, but nobody did.
The truth was I hadn’t been thinking. That day, I rose up out of the pile of dead (both my parents, my brother and his wife, my baby nephew, my siblings, my grandparents). I shook each of them, begging them to wake. When that didn’t work I wanted to sit there until I was dead myself, but I got up. Something made me stand up. I wanted to run. That was the first fully-formed thought to come to me. I wanted to run, as if I had done it, killed them all. I remember saying it out loud, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. Like I had gone mad.
Then I heard a sound. I thought it was a cat, at first. It was a small sound, barely there. I went toward it, toward another pile of people. Dead as well. Almost strangers. Then I saw a child. It could not have been more than a year old, it was so small. I picked it up and walked out of the village.
In the first few months after That Day, no one even looked at me. Everyone had somewhere else to run to, someone to look for or after, pieces of themselves to pick up off the ground. The city was broken. With the baby in my arms, I walked past my home twice, certain that I had missed a turn. It was almost an hour before I got my bearings, and then I found myself standing in front of nothing. A blank. It reminded me of when my second brother had his teeth knocked out falling from his bicycle, how he’d walked through the door, his mouth a gash of blood and black. The houses to the left and right of ours were gone as well and I could see right into our neighbors’ homes, the front of the building torn away as if they were dolls’ houses, made of paper. One kitchen on the ground floor remained intact, woks hung up ready for use, a scarlet “fortune” character for Lunar New Year still stuck on the far wall. People were wading through the rubble, cutting their ankles and hands on jagged concrete. There was nothing left. Nothing.
For a long while, I just stood there, staring at the fallen apart streets, the fallen apart people, until the baby started to cry. I shouldn’t have done this, I thought, starting to panic. I hugged the baby to my chest and walked back in the direction of the village. In my haze, I got lost, ending up at nightfall in a town I’d never been before. I was turned away at every house I went to but the last. When they opened up—husband and wife both squinting into the dusk—I knew that they would offer me shelter. What I didn’t know was that they would do it for more than three years. Fatimah and Sayeed were almost as old as my grandparents. Over the next few days, they told me about how they had moved to Singapore from Trengganu, up north in the Peninsula, how they had eloped after their parents, on both sides, disapproved of the match. They smiled at each other as they took turns telling me this, the pride of having chosen each other. Then, Fatimah asked me about my family. When I told her, she held my hands and said nothing for a while. When she spoke, she said that this was my home now. I could stay for as long as I needed.
It was only after the war that I realized how much they had risked their own lives in order to protect ours. Sayeed came home one day to say that he had seen men being rounded up in the city and heard stories about women being dragged away from their parents. Chinese people, he said, they’re taking mostly Chinese people. The next morning, Fatimah came into my bedroom with old sarong kebayas, floral, slightly faded with age. She smiled as she folded and pinned the excess cloth around me, as she pulled the creases out of the silky fabric. Then she wrapped a scarf around my hair, tucking in each tendril that peeked out. Ah, she said, when she was done. Can pass.
I passed for more than three years. Twice, during the first year, a truck full of soldiers arrived in the morning, knocking on each door in the kampong. Each time, Sayeed offered up all the eggs from his chicken coop. I could only freeze, holding the baby and looking at the ground as they swept up and down the length of the house looking for things they could take. Not again, I thought, not again. But each time, they left, leaving Fatimah and Sayeed a little poorer of sugar, flour, and rice. Afterward, Fatimah would touch me gently on the shoulder to tell me it was okay again but it would take days, weeks for me to shake myself free of the need to listen out for the sound of engines, of the need to run and hide.
It was three years before it all changed, before Fatimah fell ill and passed away. Sayeed followed soon after. I felt uneasy living in their home, as if the wooden hut were a strange and unwieldy animal that I couldn’t tame. So when the air raids began again, bringing with them rumors about the end of the occupation, I decided to leave.
I didn’t know what I was hoping for when I left the village with the child. That things were going to go back to the way they were before the war? That I would find someone back in the city, among the broken-down remains of our home? That the past three years were just a bad dream, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I needed to see the ruins of my old home again in order to remind myself that I needed to do something. That something needed to change. It was after that, after I walked past my old home, still a shock of black and rubble, that I decided to look for a zhai tang, a vegetarian hall for women. There was one I knew of, just a few streets away. When I knocked on the door, a woman with a shaved head and a gray robe waved me in, as if she had been expecting me. We sat down at a table and she poured me tea from a clay pot and asked if I had a job. When I told her no, she nodded and said that if I wanted to stay, I would have to do all the cooking and cleaning and laundry in place of paying rent. I would have to bunk with a few other women. And the boy, she said, looking at the child sleeping in my arms, the boy would be the only male in the house, no male visitors are ever allowed, she said, looking at me hard in the eyes to make sure I wasn’t thinking about it. Then she took a sip of tea and asked if I was running away from anyone. I said nothing. She waited, then asked how many people I’d lost. Twelve, I said. I counted it again in my head before I repeated myself. Twelve. The nun remained silent while we drank our tea. When I was done, she stood up and motioned for me to follow her. We walked through the single-storied house and she pointed out the altar room, the dining room and kitchen, the sleeping quarters fitted close with bunk beds.
It’s been a month since I arrived. Throughout the first few weeks, no one asked. There was a story behind this, they thought, not an interesting one, not a unique one, just another story that would remind them of why they left their families (or husbands, in some cases) to live in a shared home instead. Apart from the nuns, all of the women living in the zhai tang are older, unmarried, and working in the factories and on the roads. When they come back from work in the evenings, they perch on wooden stools in the front room, one knee folded up and pressed into their torsos, like white cranes in thick-brushed paintings. They talk about their employers, about work, about food, and always want to know what I am making for dinner, even though it is never very different from one day to the next. There is a little garden in the back where I grow sweet potatoes and tapioca to make up for the food shortages. While I clean the plants at the sink, they hover and teach me the different ways I could use the entire plant, tip to wormlike tail, for dinner. How just a spoonful of chili paste makes even the rough, veiny leaves taste good. When they ask me questions, they want to know how old the boy is, how he is doing on the limited rations, little else. They call me xiao mei, little sister, bring me extra milk powder and sneak in dried fish, which I hide in his porridge, so the nuns won’t see.
The most difficult thing I have to do here is to go out to run errands for everyone, getting rations, buying thread and cloth to patch up the nuns’ robes. Being outside terrifies me. I have to pass patrolling policemen quite often—there are many of them around to try to quell the looting and violence. Whenever I see anyone in uniform, I freeze and try to look the other way, sure they are looking for me. I would be called in to the station and there, they would show me where I had gone wrong, the bold lie in the strokes of my pen, clear for anyone to see. Where the identification papers asked for “name,” I had put in my sister-in-law’s name, hoping as I wrote, that her relatives in Shantou would never find their way here. Then I put my nephew’s name where it asked for “child or dependent.” I kept it in mind when I went to collect the remains of my family. What was left from that day. It took some time but the police eventually got around to it. I’m their daughter-in-law, I told them, I was the only family they had left.
I am not afraid anymore, not of the police anyway. The way things went during the war and in the months right after taught me that none of them knew anything. No one was in charge, not really. They were only people, with no more knowledge than you or I, trying to cross things off a list. But maybe I’m the only one foolish enough to think this.
I still have to get used to it, my new name, but as long as I am writing to you, I am no one. 無名. I haven’t heard my old name in years now—it is a name that makes me think about my past life, the one I will have to forget.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
1 March 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
On 12 February, I bought a bunch of white and yellow chrysanthemums and put it on the altar, next to plates of cake and fruit and tea. I don’t have any photographs of my family so I lit up a handful of joss sticks and watched them burn down to nothing. I watched until my eyes watered and then I reminded myself that I had elsewhere to be, things to do. I picked up the boy and fed him some of the leftover cake. Anything so I didn’t have to think about that day.
Something has changed since I started writing these letters. As if the very act of writing has shifted the air between me and the other women. The first time I did it, it was in the evening, with the child next to me, asleep. I got out some paper and a pen that I had bought earlier that day. The other women were talking or mending their clothing, fanning themselves slowly as they drank their tea. My pen was cheap and scratchy and as I wrote, the sound of it moving across the paper got louder and louder. At least that was how it seemed. But it was just the others stopping mid-sentence, turning around to watch. They put down their sewing and their sipping and simply watched. Finally, someone said, “Ah Mui, what are you writing?” Someone else, dissatisfied with the question, added “Who are you writing to?” I looked up and took just a second too long. “Family,” I replied, “in Guangdong.”
I don’t think anyone believed me. After a few seconds, when it was clear that I wasn’t going to explain just who these relations were, they went back to what they were doing, but quieter, staring from time to time. I could feel my face turning red so I stopped, got up and went into my room. As though they might be able to see what I was writing just from looking at my face.
I try to be careful. Sometimes, after I finish writing these letters, I fold them away or burn them. I tell myself that someone will find and read them and realize what I have done. That I was tempting fate. Lately, one of the sisters has taken to asking whom I’m writing to. She tries to look over my shoulder as she passes by, sucking the air from between her teeth. But I know she is illiterate so I don’t bother to shield the sheet of paper I’m writing on. Read it if you want, I told her once, pushing my chair back to allow her to look. She’d walked away, sucking even louder on her teeth. I should take more caution; all it takes is a letter reader and a coin or two. That’s what you would do, I think, if you received this letter one day and found yourself unable to read it. Then I tell myself that I shouldn’t be writing to you. I shouldn’t be thinking about sending these letters but I can’t stop myself. After everyone else in the room has fallen asleep—the boy in a corner of our bed and the other five women in the room—my words run wild in the dark until my voice is all I hear and I have to get up and go to the kitchen with sheets of paper and a pen. When I’m done writing, I tuck the letters under the mattress, right beneath my pillow, and fall asleep the moment I close my eyes. One day I might be brave enough to send them, or to turn up on your doorstep with the boy. One day I might be ready to let him leave me.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
17 June 1946
Chia Soon Wei,
This will probably be the last letter I write to you. Or one of the last. (Sometimes I forget that I never send them anyway, or want to but never will.) It’s been a few months since I wrote and a few things have changed. I’m no longer living in the zhai tang—the same sister who tried to read my letters began to watch me and ask me questions. She started asking them in private at first, wanting to know which village I lived in before the war, where in China my parents or grandparents grew up in, what happened to my husband. I told her that I lived in Bukit Timah, and that my family came from Shantou, and left it at that. But neither of my answers made her happy and she made that little sucking noise with her teeth again as I walked out of the room. She waited a few days before repeating the questions, this time from the other end of the dining hall with everyone seated and eating. The clink and murmur of mealtime dwindled to a low and I felt as if someone had pressed a hot cloth to the back of my neck. My answers came out stammered, and in the warm, crowded dining hall, they sounded hollow and unfinished. A silence hung at the end of my words and all around the room, dark eyes and busy mouths were waiting, waiting for me to go on. But I said nothing, I couldn’t, and went back to feeding the boy his rice porridge. The sister sat back and chewed, her jaw working in a rectangle like a goat’s.
I spent the next few mornings at the market, asking around about work. In the end, someone told me that a family she knew was looking for a nanny. I went that very day and got the job on the spot. The parents are wealthy, English-speaking Hakka people; they wanted a Chinese-speaking nanny for their two children. I’m picking up quite a bit of English from the children and their mother though I can’t read or write it of course. My favorite part of the job is reading them Chinese-language books and then going home with the stories in my head so I can tell them to the boy. My salary allowed me to move out and rent a shared room in Chinatown. I felt bad leaving but I knew I had to. It was the only way to stop the questions that were bound to come from the rest of the women.
It’s harder now, here, but easier, in a way. I live in the second-floor room of a shophouse with five other people—laborers, mostly, women who finish their day with dirt under their nails and dust on their clothes, and one amah, who wears a white-and-black uniform and sometimes brings home leftovers from her employer’s rich meals. Everyone has a plaid or floral curtain covering their bunk and it is behind this curtain that I’m writing. The landlady helps to mind the children (there are three in the shophouse building, including one of her own) during the day, and in the evening, everyone makes their own food. The first day I was there, I asked if they paid for cooked meals and they hushed me, told me the landlady would suck me dry. Instead, I share a paraffin stove with my roommates and trade ikan bilis, sambal, and halves or quarters of salted duck eggs. In the evenings, when it’s cool enough not to have to fan ourselves, the landlady plays her records and all of us stop what we’re doing to listen to “Rose, Rose” or “Shangri-La.” The women talk about wanting children and tell me how lucky I am to have a little boy. “He’s going to take care of you in a few years,” they say, and I want to ask why they put their hair up, why they chose not to marry, but I don’t. There wasn’t any need to anyway, because Poh Ju showed me the burn marks down the side of her arm. A river of shiny, stretched-out skin. “Hot water,” she said, peering over her own shoulder, a look of mild surprise on her face as if she hadn’t seen it before, or hadn’t looked at it closely for a long time. “I ran away the next day.” She told me I would hear the other stories soon enough. Everyone had a good reason to be there.
I miss nothing about the zhai tang, except for the garden and my plants.
I’m sure you want to know how he’s doing. The boy is fine. He is healthy and finally gaining weight after years of eating rationed food and root vegetables. He doesn’t speak much, even though he must be around five years old now. Sometimes he wakes up in the night to scream and no milk or food or rocking will calm him. The other women in my room don’t mind. Or they don’t show that they do, which is good enough for me. One of them has a little girl of her own and she says it’s because of the air raids from before. That it will pass. I don’t ask her where her husband is and she doesn’t ask me. No one does. Whatever they (my roommates, strangers, the hawkers I buy my groceries from every week) think, it is something charitable and I get offered extra powdered milk, and leftover cuts of meat and bone from the butcher’s wife when he is in my arms.
I want to ask how you are. But since I am the only one who reads these words, maybe I could say this: you are better ever since the war ended. You are living with your parents again, perhaps in their fishing village at the shore, or helping out with their pineapple farms that are doing so well now that people are starting to have more money to spend on food. You are still young and there is a woman next door with clear, round eyes, and dimples on her cheeks. She smiles at you whenever you pass each other on the street until you get the courage to ask to visit her at home one evening, you have nothing to lose anyway. Her parents like how hard you work, leaving home at five every morning and only coming home at six, and they nod when you ask them for their daughter’s hand. You set up home with her, maybe even building it with your own hands. There is a large front yard for herbs and a mango tree, and an extra bedroom for the children you will have.
This is the least I can wish for you.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
2 January 2000
To my son,
If you’ve read this far, it would mean that you now know much more than I have told you in the last fifty-eight years. So much happened during the war but there are some things I have been brave enough to do, and some things that I just couldn’t face doing.
When I made up my mind to keep you, or rather, when I realized that I couldn’t return you, I wrote these letters. I started the first few determined to send them out to Chia Soon Wei, whom I believe to be your father. And then I wrote because I couldn’t not. The same as when I kept you...because I couldn’t not. I didn’t throw the letters away either even though the threat of you finding them was enormous, especially when you started to read and write, because I wanted to use them to explain myself to you somehow.
I thought I could do it. I told myself that I had to tell you the truth when you turned eighteen. You had every right to know. When you reached your eighteenth, I changed it to twenty-one. Twenty-one turned to twenty-five. Eventually I stopped bargaining with myself. Like I said, there were some things that I just couldn’t face doing.
My only hope was that you would stumble upon this after my death and I’m glad you have now. I hope that it’s not too late and that you will forgive me someday.
Your loving mother
It took me ten minutes to run all the way home. The clouds were just beginning to break—a drop here and there—when I arrived. I got the shoebox out from the chest of drawers, found the piece of paper with the telephone number on it and dialed, thinking all the while that the roar in my ears was coming from my own head, my heart. I wanted to get it out as soon as I could, so when someone finally picked up, a woman, I said it straightaway—asked if she was Mrs. Chia. She didn’t understand me, so I asked again, in Chinese. She said yes, so I told her who I was and who I might be to her. She gave me her address and I asked if it would be okay if I went to see her that evening. After putting the phone down, I looked out of the window and realized what it was, the noise. Just the sky. Falling open.