After what happened at the market, my father decided that my mother and I had to stay within the kampong for our own safety. I still had my makeshift stall, though it was now confined to the heart of the village, close to a little huddle of shops. Sales were slow and whatever I sold went at a cutthroat rate in the afternoon, when the villagers knew I was close to packing up and going home; unlike the city dwellers, they had the space to grow their own vegetables and the knack for foraging in the fields. Vegetables were easy enough to get. What we all lacked was eggs, meat, fresh fish, and staples, like rice and flour and salt, which my mother knew would remain scarce until after the war. It was with this intuition that she cleared out a plot of earth in the back between the trees and got me to help plant the cuttings of cassava, potato, and tapioca plants. When rice rationing was at its worst, forcing entire households to live on a single bowl of rice a day, it would be these cuttings that kept my family alive through the next four years.
While I busied myself with the stall and the kitchen garden, Yan Ling continued going into the city. Instead of walking with her, I waved from the garden as she passed the house. Sometimes she stopped to chat but more and more I only caught brief glimpses of her as she left for work, braiding her hair as she ran up the lane. I had finished doing my chores one evening when I decided to visit her. Instead of Yan Ling, it was her mother who answered the door.
“Are you looking for Yan Ling? She’s still at the eating house.”
“Oh, I thought she would be home by now. What time will she be back?”
“I don’t know. Late, I think. The eating house is even busier now with the Japanese soldiers. They’ve had to put in more tables.” She paused and looked me up and down as if seeing me for the first time. “Listen, do you want to make some money? Yan Ling said that they are looking for more waitresses. I heard there was even an advertisement in the Syonan Times. They want girls aged seventeen to twenty-eight. You’re seventeen, right? I would get Yan Ling to do it if she could, but you know...” She tutted, brushing a finger over her top lip. “They only want her working in the back of the house.”
The possibility of bringing in money interested me almost as much as the chance of seeing my friend again. “I’ll ask my parents.”
“I heard they pay well. You get tips.”
“Tips?”
“If they like you.”
My next word would have been, “Who?” but I heard my mother calling out for me and had to go. “I’ll ask my parents,” I repeated.
I did it over dinner. The rations weren’t enough, as my mother had predicted, but she made do with what we did have, spreading the essentials thinly across the weeks so that we wouldn’t run out before the end of the month. To achieve this, she supplemented our meals with the root vegetables that we had planted—adding them to every dish—and used pickled vegetable and anchovies and chili to impart flavor in place of salt. That night, we had watered-down congee, bulked up and tinged purple with tapioca, and topped with pickled radish.
“Ba, Ma, they’re looking for new waitresses where Yan Ling works. At the eating house.”
“When did you see her?” my father asked.
“I didn’t. Her mother told me. They need more people to help out...and you get tips.”
“Tips?” my father spat. “You know who gets tips? Tell that woman to keep her suggestions to herself. She can get her daughters to do whatever she wants but I don’t want to hear—”
“No need to get angry, lah. She was only trying to help,” my mother said. She shot a warning look in my direction.
“Help? There’s enough for you to do at home. Once it calms down, you can go to the market again with your mother. Maybe we can make some money selling sweet potato plants.”
There was a moment’s silence before my mother spoke again, her voice strained, a little too high. “Children, your father found a job today. Did you know?”
“Ba, you found a job?” said Yang, looking up.
“Just for a while. Carrying stones at the construction site. The shophouses and shipyards need to be rebuilt.” I knew what this meant—taking away rubble from caved-in shophouses, back-breaking work that only xin ke—fresh immigrants—were willing to take on, work that he was lucky to get now. I knew, too, how much my father hated it.
My brother flinched. “You mean... You mean you work for the Japanese now?”
“Yang, finish your food.”
In April, Yang and Meng went back to school to find that most of their teachers had been replaced. All the Chinese instructors were gone; some of them, the husbands of women in our neighborhood, had never made it back from the reporting stations. They simply vanished, as if they’d never existed. No one asked questions; the wives they left behind adjusted by taking on odd jobs in the city, all the while hoping that their husbands might return home one day.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” Yang said after his first day back. “All they do is play the Japanese broadcasts and make us learn their national anthem.”
There were no more Chinese language classes, he informed us. Instead, there were new teachers at school. Students spent most of their time learning Japanese. “Even mathematics is taught in Japanese now,” Yang went on. It was his favorite subject and I remembered how he said he wanted to teach it one day, perhaps at the same school, perhaps in the city, he didn’t yet know.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” he repeated over dinner. It was then that I looked up and realized that his face had changed in the last few months. He used to look like my mother, with the same softness in his cheeks and mouth. Now, when I looked at him, all I could see was my father. The swarthiness of his skin, the angles in his jaw.
Both Yang and Meng grumbled for a few weeks but they got used to it, the way children their age got used to things. Before long, they were coming home from school with dirt on their shoes from playing football in the bare field as if nothing had changed. Meng, in particular, took to practicing his Japanese around the house. “Konnichiwa, good afternoon. Ohayou gozaimasu, good morning. Arigatou gozaimasu, thank you,” he would chant, repeating his vocabulary list until Yang shouted at him to stop.
Nothing had changed except everything had.
The island was small, smaller than my parents’ ancestral town in China, and news spread the old way, with people whispering to each other as they went about their work and grocery shopping. Each Sunday a neighbor would drop by our hut and sit down for a half hour of gossip over coffee; they would tell the boys to go outside if they weren’t already playing in the fields. I was usually in the back, quiet and forgotten. This was what I heard: a whole kampong set ablaze because the families, all of them Chinese, were among those who sent money back to the old country so they could buy weapons to defend themselves against the Japanese. The way the occupiers simply took what they saw and wanted—bales of expensive silk from the tailors, bicycles from people on the street, pushing them off and riding away, laughing. From the traveling noodle hawker, we heard stories about women and girls as young as ten being assaulted in their own homes by bands of soldiers, their children and husbands bayoneted if the soldiers met any resistance.
I listened to these stories, always the same stories in a slightly different form, gorging myself on each little detail. At night, I turned them over and over in my head as I went to sleep in an effort to guard myself against similar horrors. As if by thinking about them, dreaming about them, and keeping them close, they would be kept away from us in real, waking life.
It was around this time that the women in our kampong began turning into boys overnight. Oversize shirts and trousers replaced floral blouses. Some wore caps to shield their faces and bound their chests to hide their curves. A few went a little further and shed their braids and ponytails to take on short crops—dark, jagged ends cut close to their necks. The rest got married. Month after month, I watched as rickshaws rode up to our neighbors’ houses. There were no fireworks, no music at any of the weddings, little else but the sound of light chatter as the bride got into the rickshaw, and the others followed. One of these women was a cousin of Yan Ling’s. For the occasion, Yan Ling had been coiffed and made-up. Normally she would have enjoyed it but now she looked uncomfortable and her eyes were far away. It was the first time in months that I had seen her and I tried to wave from where I was standing, within a crowd a little away from her family, but she did not look. Not once.
“Lucky girl, she’ll be safe from the Japanese,” said my mother to a neighbor.
“Oh, it’s no guarantee. Those people, they don’t care...” The neighbor lowered her voice, her words drowned out by the sound of more clapping.
When Auntie Tin came by a few weeks after that, she received tea and a bit of kueh that my mother had made from the previous bit of flour and sugar we had. This time, my parents were the ones who wanted something out of the visit.
“It might take a while. So many girls want to find a husband.”
“I know, I know. It’s the way things are. But please, her father wants it to happen as soon as possible.”
“I’ll try my best. I always do. Wang Di will need to get a photo taken. And tell her to smile, she looks so nice when she smiles.” The matchmaker looked naked and lost without her earrings, her bracelets. All that remained was one jade bangle around her left wrist. The bangle slid down her arm as she waved goodbye and I wondered what she had sold the rest for and if it was enough to keep her family from starving.
“I wouldn’t ask you to come with me if your mother wasn’t ill,” my father said. I wanted to say of course she was ill, she ate scraps so that Meng and Yang would have enough, but I shut up and listened as he handed me one of his shirts and told me to rub coal dust onto my face.
We had to get rice, flour, and noodles, each from a different distribution center. Throughout the journey, he reminded me time and again to lower my head and keep my eyes to the ground. The queue at the distribution center went all the way down the street and it inched along for an hour until a fight broke out.
“What’s going on, Ba?”
“Ah, the usual. Somebody’s trying to cut in. A young couple.”
I stepped out of the line for a better look, just in time to see an open-top vehicle pull up. Two uniformed men jumped out, shouting in Japanese. One of them started waving his rifle around and the line shifted, moving away from the men in a wave. A sharp scream, and then, “No, please. She’s my wife!”
There was a dull whack of wood against flesh. Then another scream. I moved my face into a gap above my father’s shoulder just in time to see the woman being hauled out of the line and dragged into the vehicle. Her screams didn’t stop but simply faded away as the car started up again and drove off.
The line murmured and surged, spitting the man out. He got up and stumbled in the direction the car had taken.
“Oh, poor thing.” Someone behind us tutted.
“Stupid. Making trouble and attracting attention. He shouldn’t have done it. Cutting in like that.” My father turned away. Even with his arms folded, I could see that his hands were trembling. It took half an hour before we got to the front of the line.
The sky broke on our way back and only stopped when we were in our kampong. It was three in the afternoon and by the time we reached home, we were both soaked. My father put his bags on the kitchen table and hurried toward the door. “I’m going to get the salt. You can stay home.”
“Oh, you’re going to fall ill like that,” my mother said when I went in, dripping. She was thin, paler than I ever saw her, and looking fifty instead of her thirty-odd years. “Come here, there’s fresh water in the bucket.” She made me follow her into the backyard, told me to squat and tip my head forward as she poured warm water over my head. The rationed soap was black and bit into my skin but I kept quiet. Later, whenever anyone mentioned my mother, I would remember this. The smell of wartime soap, the rasp of her fingernails along my scalp.
My hair had grown waist-length from neglect, and I was at the window, combing out the tangled ends and trying to catch the warm breeze in an effort to dry it when my father returned.
He flung the door open and when I swung to look at him, his eyes were wide with alarm, as if he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to.
“What are you doing by the window? I could see you all the way from up the lane.”
I couldn’t think of an answer, simply let my hands drop to my sides and stared at him.
He disappeared into the bedroom and came back out again after a minute. I only saw a flash of the blade but I knew he had my mother’s sewing scissors in his hand.
I started to run but he grabbed first my arm, then a fistful of hair. “Stand still. I don’t want to hurt you.”
My mother, who had been at the kitchen table all the while, started screaming. “Have you gone mad? What are you doing?”
The shock of cold steel against my neck made me flinch. Then I heard the familiar, flinty clip right next to my ear, saw the first clump of hair floating to the floor before my vision blurred, everything obscured by the fog of my tears. He took care not to nick my skin and worked in silence for minutes until thick sheets of black hair lay at our feet. It looked like a dead animal, run over on the street.
What a pity, I thought. We could have sold it if he cut it all off in one straight line. My mother continued screaming. The sound of it stayed with me the entire night. Long after my father had put away the scissors. Long after he said, “It’s for your own good, you should know that.” Then, he walked away and returned the scissors to my mother’s sewing basket. It was her scream which kept me up. The sound of it spoke of everything no one dared to talk about: what the soldiers were doing, young and afraid and separated from their families. It spoke of the things everyone was to keep silent about all through the three and a half years we belonged to the Japanese, and of the decades after.
The sight of my roughly-cut hair unnerved my mother. She fussed with it, sitting me down at the kitchen table as soon as it was light, and trimming the back with a smaller pair of scissors to even out the ends.
After a month, she sighed and said that it was getting too late.
“We can’t wait any longer. Auntie Tin needs a photo of you. We’ll just make do. It looks quite nice, like this.”
At the photographer’s studio, my mother and I were shown to a corner with a mirror. There was rouge paper and powder on a table next to it; she showed me how to put my lips over the paper to press the red on my mouth while she dusted pink into my cheeks. I couldn’t stop looking into the mirror even though I didn’t want to. I was used to hiding behind my hair and the loss of it revealed the unevenness of my eyes, the blunt slope of my nose, the mole beneath my left eye.
“A tear mole,” she said, when I touched it with the tip of my finger. She patted powder over it but it stood out, like a smudge someone had tried and failed to rub away.
Tears, I thought, and bad luck. But I said nothing and sat as she combed my fringe into a smooth curve above my eyes.
The photographer was a middle-aged man behind a large standing-up camera. “Oh,” he said, seeing me for the first time. He pointed a finger to his own neck, as if flicking away his collar. “How...modern.”
When the photos came out, my mother put them in an envelope and got my father to cycle over to Auntie Tin’s. He had said nothing about the incident but smiled at me now and again as if trying to cheer me up. “The hair makes you look young. Not bad for the matchmaker.”
There wasn’t a choice this time. No one was asking me if I was ready. My father said that I would be better fed, that married couples received slightly bigger rations. “Reason enough to get married,” he had said, trying to sound light.
We heard nothing from the matchmaker, not after two months. “Don’t worry. It’s only because there are so many people looking to get married. The matchmaker has to work day and night. It might take a while but it will be no problem... No problem.”
It was the first Saturday of August when it happened. Late afternoon. My mother and I were sorting the rice for dinner, sifting broken grains and weevil from the rest when both of us looked up to a distant drone, a low whirr of activity making its way to our village. I was standing at the kitchen and an ache settled into my stomach as my father came in from the backyard. He had been digging up tapioca, tending to the plants, and there was a smear of dirt on his forehead, right above his eyes, and he stood still for a moment, listening before he went to the door and looked out to where my brothers were, squatting in a circle with three other boys. Fighting crickets, I guessed, or playing with marbles, I couldn’t tell.
“Meng! Yang! Come into the house,” he yelled.
By the time my brothers arrived back, panting, we could see the trucks. Two of them, the sides muddied up, as if they had driven through ditches in the rain. There were eight to ten soldiers in the back of one truck. The other was carrying nothing, making space for what they’re going to take from us.
The soldiers we saw the last time had looked bedraggled and tired, as if they needed sleep and would have given anything for a shower and clean sheets. Now they peered around at us as they rolled up the lane, awake, alert, their faces peaked with something akin to hunger. Someone in the first vehicle called out and both of them sank to a stop a few houses away, close to the center of the kampong. The ones sitting in the back of the truck jumped out, hitching their trousers up and talking among themselves.
“Everyone, outside at once!” It was the same interpreter. I recognized his voice, unadulterated as it was without a loudspeaker.
“Don’t bother hiding the rice. They’ll find it anyway,” my father said to my mother as she pushed herself up from her chair, eyes wide, as though he could read her mind. “Just let them take what they want.”
In two minutes, everyone—young, old, and poorly—was standing in the dust in front of their homes. Each step my mother took was an effort so my father stayed close to her, one hand hovering near the small of her back. I had Meng’s hand in mine and was looking at my feet, waiting for it to be over with when I felt him pulling away. I tugged at his fingers to get him to come closer but his chin was tilted up and he was taking little gulps of air. The men stood in a cluster by their trucks, as if waiting for a command. Then, out of the tight silence, my brother opened his mouth.
“Konnichiwa.”
Everyone froze. Meng was smiling, proud that he remembered the words, that he had got it right. The soldiers looked around and laughed with surprise. One of them came forward and reached into his pocket. His eyes were twinkling as he drew out a piece of candy wrapped in red-and-white paper and held it out in his upturned palm, in front of Meng’s face.
My brother looked to my father, then my mother, for permission but their eyes were panicked. They didn’t speak. After a pause, Meng shook me off to reach for the offered sweet and I watched him pick it up between thumb and forefinger. Their hands touched for a fraction of a second and the moment stretched out impossibly before Meng withdrew his hand and put the wrapped sweet in his pocket for safekeeping.
“Ari-ga-toh goz-aiii-mas,” he said, with an even wider smile. His front tooth was missing and it made him look even younger than he was.
The soldier ruffled Meng’s hair. He was young, and like the rest, appeared to be in his twenties. He was still smiling when his eyes fell on me. His face was small, foxlike, and he was fair, unlike his compatriots, who were mostly darkened by the sun. He crooked his finger at the soldiers, who came running and they spoke for a second before the interpreter looked at me and said in Mandarin, “Yoshida-san says he would like you to come with us.”
I shook my head and took a step backward, right into someone’s arms. Turned around to see my mother’s face, tight with fear. She pulled me to her, so close that I could hear her breathe.
“You will get work, make some money for your family.”
The soldier still had his hand on my brother’s head. There was a pause before he frowned and said something else. Then he lunged toward me and grabbed my wrist.
I pulled back, trying to wrench myself free, and felt my mother’s arms tighten around me. Then my father stepped around us, trying to put himself between us and the soldiers. His eyes were shining and his hands were stretched out in front of him. He opened his mouth wide. What came out was nothing, a croak. He spoke again and this time I heard him. “Wait! Wait, she’s just a child.” He grabbed my other wrist, pulling me toward him.
The soldier closed his fingers around me, tighter, and pulled again before realizing that my father wasn’t going to let go. He shouted, then flicked the blunt end of his rifle into my father’s face, making him fall backward; the skin on his eyebrow split open and blood trickled into his eye, over his cheek. The soldier rammed his rifle into my father again, this time in his stomach, making him double over. My mother finally let go of me, loosening her arms from around my body to go to my father, as the soldier stood over him, waiting, daring him to get up, his rifle in the air. As he did this, the glint of metal on his bayonet caught my eye.
Grab it, sink into it, I thought. But my limbs were stone. By the time I moved, I was too late.
Someone had appeared next to me with a length of rope, making short work of binding my wrists. There was a wooden plank leading up to the truck bed and he jabbed the bayonet at me and walked me up. I smelled alcohol on his breath as he pulled at my binds and trussed me to the side rail. I sat there, straining at the rope, and watched as the group marched past each house, pulling girls and women away from their families. What came to mind again was the image of wild dogs, the pack of them that had burrowed its way into our coop. The pack had continued their sack of the village’s coops, taking prey out of our neighbors’ gardens night after night. A few each week, until the pack moved on to another village. As if they knew they were running out of luck and out of prey.
Each of the girls resisted. One of them flailed, hitting a soldier across the face. There was a wild roar and I saw her getting pushed to the ground and kicked by the men surrounding her, before being taken back into her own home by four soldiers, one at each limb. She screamed as they dragged her in. Like a pig being brought to slaughter. I heard her howls, the sound of them reaching high over the thatched roofs, cracking the languid stillness of the afternoon.
While she cried, the other soldiers picked out five more women and girls, pulling them away from their families the way they had done with me. They were mostly my age, still in school, except for one. A young mother. The wife of a young man who lived a few doors away from us. High-school sweethearts—the couple had met while they were still children, my mother had told me. It was just last week that she had come around with her baby in her arms, smiled and presented my mother with two eggs, painted red for good luck, to celebrate their son’s first full month. I heard a baby’s wail. Hers, I thought numbly. All the feeling had gone from my limbs and I watched as half of them were pushed in after me, and the rest into the other truck. The ones who didn’t move or couldn’t were hauled up, as I had been, in tears or shocked into stillness. I had to put my fingers to my face to see if I was crying. No.
There was a loud, sharp pop, then another, and then another. The four men who had pulled the woman into her hut came out. The last of them, the one who looked the youngest, was tucking his shirttails into his trousers, his face flushed red. He could have been anyone. A friend of Yang’s, sweat-soaked after a football game. Anyone. While the rest piled into the first truck, he climbed up the back and sat at the end of ours, resting the rifle across his knees.
I looked over at my family, crouching in front of our home. My mother was sitting on the ground, cradling my father’s bloodied head. He wasn’t moving. From where I was, I couldn’t see his eyes, and I couldn’t tell if he was dead or simply unconscious. I felt an urge to jump and run to him and I stood, tried to. But the length of rope tethering me to the side rails was too short even for that. I sat back down, hard, making the truck quiver.
“Ma,” I said, but my voice came out in half a whisper.
She heard it all the same. Her eyes were fixed on me, mouth open in a silent yelp. There was a rattle. I felt the truck shudder back to life, and then we were moving. Yang and several other people ran toward us, then stopped, as if held back by an invisible wall. I watched as our attap hut got smaller, watched as Meng scrambled to his feet and started running after me, while Yang tried and failed to grab him by the back of his shirt.
“Jie-jie,” he shouted.
The truck sped up. Meng pumped his arms to propel himself forward and his tiny bird’s chest pushed out, filling and filling with air. He ran for a few hundred meters before tripping and falling forward in the sand. The driver took a bend in the road and I turned my head to watch as my brother pushed himself halfway up, his eyes shining, before I lost all sight of him.
It took me a while to realize that they were driving us south, but until then, I could hardly see or hear from the whirr of panic in my chest, a constant whoosh in my ears which I took for the wind but was just my breath, coming in quick and much too shallow. We passed kampongs, all a blur of green and earth brown. The wild, cheerful voices of the driver and his passenger over the grind of the engine. Then, singing. Just minutes after one of them had thrown a woman on the ground, tied her up and pushed her onto a truck like cattle. Could someone like that sing? Laugh? I thought. I was sweating, and the back of my blouse stuck to my skin. Blood was on my trouser knee. Not mine. My father’s. I looked up and blinked. Across from me sat the woman who had been taken away from her husband and child. She was tugging at the rope around her wrists. Don’t cry, I told myself. See? She’s not crying. Don’t cry and there will be nothing to cry about. Something my mother liked to say. Mothers. The woman was still trying to twist loose of her binds and I was reminded of a sparrow that I had seen once caught in a tangle of kite string, frantic to break free. I watched her until I felt someone’s eyes on me and turned to my right. A girl. Familiar looking. Her hair tied back into a braid. Round cheeks that dipped into a small, pointed chin, making her look elfin. Then a faint memory of my mother gushing about how pretty she was, how she would have her pick of husbands when the time came. I’d felt a stab of jealousy, fine as needle, whenever I saw her in the village after that. How foolish, I thought now, what nonsense.
“You’re Auntie Ng’s daughter,” she said, with a calm that made me stop and look at her full in the face. Her eyes were red, her collar ripped and flapping in the wind.
“And you...you live on the west side of the kampong.” My voice sounded odd—strained and out of place. The soldier sitting guard looked up at the sound of our voices, then turned his head to look out at the road behind the truck, unperturbed. It didn’t matter, he must think, just women, talking.
Huay, I recalled. The girl’s name was Huay. Her parents owned a convenience store, a tiny shop that didn’t allow more than two people in it at the same time, and then their name: Seetoh, a name so unusual that they were the only Seetohs I knew of; the sound of this name conjuring up something hazily exotic each time I heard it. I had a memory of Huay’s face, lit red by a paper lantern, younger siblings around her legs, tugging at her hands and clothes; Huay trying to herd them through the mid-autumn festival crush. I forced myself to smile at her. I felt I had to, and she smiled back. As if we were out on a ride, a jaunt that somebody had arranged for us. It was all just a bit of fun; it would be over in a minute. Too nervous to speak any further, I looked away, past her and returned to staring at the road, the trees.
After twenty minutes, the truck entered a wide street busy with traffic. It was lined on both sides with shops grander than the ones in Chinatown, and tall buildings with bold signs, spelling things out in English. This must be Orchard Road, I guessed. I’d passed this street a few times on the way to Chinatown. Never stopped. There was nothing for me here. It might as well have been another country. After a few minutes, the driver turned right, slipping into a residential street. More town houses, taller, the white paint on them fresh. There were no sheltered walkways here but little gardens beyond gates, and paved walkways leading up to each front door. The truck ambled past a row of them, past a carefully made-up woman leaning out of a second-floor window, past a group of workmen hurrying boxes from the back of a van into an alley. I waited for one of the men to look up—I would wave, give a signal, I thought, and they would come to ask what was wrong and how could they help. I would arrive home that evening and tell my parents that it was all right, nothing happened, everything was okay after all. But no, the men kept their eyes on the ground. A couple of them turned their heads as if they’d smelled something rotten. Finally, the driver stopped in front of a town house with a signboard up front, red letters screaming something in Chinese or Japanese. All of us shrank away as the guards unlatched the tailgate, but they only chose two girls, untying the ropes from the side rails and dragging them off. My neighbor, the one with the infant, was taken off; I could see from the way she was standing, tall, her weight even on both feet, that she was readying herself to run or fight. The door opened and they were pushed in, one after the next. We drove off again.
The truck was driving east. After what seemed like hours, a deep panic set it. I couldn’t understand how we could still be driving. I looked up at the sun. Wouldn’t be long until it set. I wondered if they would stop at dusk. Then at the thought of night, another shot of panic. I looked around me—nothing I could recognize. How little my world was. Maybe we’re never going to stop, not until we get to the edge of the island. I could already see us plunging straight into the sea, to an inevitable, watery death. Trapped and drowned the way they used to drown adulterers and fallen women. But no, no sight of water. Not a whiff of its salt and mud. Instead, more buildings and factories, all of them interspersed with swaths of grass and nothing else. Then another stop where two girls were taken off, until it was just Huay and me left.
A different neighborhood now. The sun was ahead of us. So we’re headed west, I decided, right before the truck turned left into a lane, then right again. And then we were surrounded by the thick green of tembusu trees with their low, pronged branches, like arms held wide open. The high-pitched whine of crickets. I saw a few houses far apart from each other—bungalows with black-and-white rolling curtains, and clusters of low buildings that looked like a large school or barracks. There were a few road signs in English—nothing I could make out, of course. I wanted to ask Huay but she was staring down at her knees, unseeing. If only I had gone to school, I thought. Then, another thought, bitter and fleeting: even if I could read, so what?
The sun was shining a dark orange, the curve of it almost melting into the tops of trees when the truck turned into a narrow, meandering lane. There, the canopy grew so thick that the trees blocked out much of the light and the truck snaked along in semidarkness until it broke open into a clearing where a sentry was on duty behind the gate. He called out as he let us through and the young soldier sitting at the end of the truck called back and laughed as he untied my rope from around the side rail. Then he leaped off and jerked at the end of the rope he held in his hand until I jumped off after him, almost tipping to my knees. It was only then, standing on the warm tarmac that I realized that I was barefoot. Huay followed, hardly making a sound as she landed.
My father had talked about houses like these, houses mostly owned by the wealthy expatriate or military families from Britain. He had delivered furniture to the private residences a few times, and each time he had come home, still wide-eyed from the experience. “You won’t believe how big they are. The gardens these ang moh have,” he’d gushed. Standing there, I had a sudden image of him dismounting his bicycle, tilting his head back to stare at the two-story bungalow, white except for the black wooden beams and window frames, and its pitched, terra-cotta roof. There was a perimeter of barbed wire all around it, newly raised and clean of leaf litter. Beyond that, a thick wooded area and a wall of cricket song, loud and insistent.
The same soldier marched us around the house to the back, toward a separate, single-story building a few meters away. It was constructed in the same style, just cheaper, smaller, though it was still twice the size of my home. Compared to the bungalow though, it looked doll-sized, unreal. A guesthouse fallen to ruin. Servants’ quarters. The idea of the last filled me with hope, dangerous and sharp-edged. I held on to it even as another guard opened the door and I was pushed over the threshold, into the house. It smelled of rice and tea, and something bitter, medicinal. Huay stumbled in after me, scuffing her feet along the concrete floor. The front room was empty of furnishings, but for a long wooden bench lining the wall and a desk with papers and boxes on top. And then faces. Men. And a few women, disheveled and oddly clothed, all a blur. I felt the heat of someone else’s body behind me, much too close, before I was pushed by a soldier past the counter into a narrow hallway, on and on past several doors until he halted, holding on to my arm to make me stop. The soldier opened the door, then walked around to look at me. As he did so, the tip of his rifle brushed against my kneecap, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. Then he removed a knife from his belt and walked around to stand behind me. I felt him tug at my binds and begin to cut through them. He shoved me again, harder, until I fell forward, through the doorway, onto a rattan mat. The rope loosened itself from my wrists and slipped to the ground. There was no need for it anymore.
I spun around, ready to scream, but the soldier was already leaving, pulling the door shut behind him. I heard the heavy drop of the padlock against the wood, then footsteps as he went down the corridor.
The room was no bigger than three by four paces and separated from the ones next to it by thin plywood. At the end of it was what used to be a window, but with the glass smashed out and boarded up from the outside. Most of the space was taken up by a rattan mat. Next to it was a small rag and a dark bottle filled with clear liquid. I uncorked it and sniffed. Disinfectant. Then I sat down with my knees up, my back against the far wall. For hours, a steady stream of people went back and forth along the corridor and I froze each time the sound of footfall stopped outside. Once, I saw boot tips underneath the door and I drew myself backward, wanting to push myself into the concrete, holding my breath until whoever it was went away.
That was how I sat the rest of the night; I couldn’t sleep for the orchestra of noises outside the house. I could hear the hum coming from the woods nearby, of insect song and, later, the woeful cry of the koel, which meant the sun was setting. As the scratching of crickets peaked at sundown and wound down into a high-pitched whine, the strip of daylight beneath the door receded slowly into the glow of lamplight. Eventually, someone extinguished that as well and I heard the heavy grind of a lock being turned, like a warning. Then darkness, solid and unrelenting. I sat with my back in a corner, eyes wide and staring into the tarry dark, imagining light and shapes where there were none and trying to tell time from the sounds I heard. I dropped in and out of sleep but started awake from time to time, because louder than everything else was the silence of girls like me, in rooms next to mine and rooms next to that, afraid and waiting.