There were just two people left who’d known the Old One and she had two hours that evening to find them. Two hours between five and dinnertime, during which the cooler temperatures made it pleasant enough to be outside. She knew them simply as Leong and Ah Ren. At the Old One’s funeral, Leong had shaken her hand and said how sorry he was while his brother—younger but graying before him—stood aside and looked on. She hadn’t asked that day, but was aware, from talk, that they had chosen to stay in the same neighborhood. She remembered how the housing agent had told her it was “just down the road,” and how endless the trek of that morning had been, and armed herself with a plastic bottle and her pushcart.
As she walked she had the discomfiting sense of having stepped, unwittingly, into another country. Her new building was sickly orange, and each one in the cluster was violently colored, not sun-bleached and streaked with pigeon and mynah droppings. There were more flowering plants around the new estate, another riot of colors, green and pink and purple, to make up for the shut-in feeling people get from living in shoebox apartments. For more than an hour, she weaved in and out of the clusters of buildings, taking note of lift landings and large public bins, the back of shops and food courts where people left out boxes and tins emptied of beans, meat, or fruit in syrup. Made a map of the neighborhood in her head and tucked it away for later. The Old One had often marveled at her memory, at the ease with which she rattled off telephone numbers, recipes she got off the cooking show on TV, and led the way to places that she had visited just once. “That’s what happens when you can’t write things down, I have no choice but to know it all by heart,” she’d explained. And stopped. Wishing she didn’t remember everything. Soon Wei had noticed the look on her face and changed the subject, talking about how forgetful he was getting, how lucky he was to have a young wife. “Silly old fool,” she had said, and laughed, shaking her head.
It was only after dark that Wang Di decided to call it a day. She wondered how long it would take her to find the brothers and what she would do if she never found them. She didn’t even know their last names, couldn’t call directory services to ask. Both thoughts were enough to make her want to lie down and never get up again, so she kept walking until she couldn’t anymore, until she was out of the fold of buildings and in front of a newly-built shopping mall. Glossy as a beetle. The cool air within it like a blast from a fridge every time someone entered or left the building through its sliding glass doors. Next to it was the train station, which the housing officer had boasted about. They could hop on and off public transport if they wanted to, it was practically at their doorstep. Made things easy for visiting children and grandchildren, he’d added.
Except we don’t have children, she had wanted to shout, and my legs are no longer what they used to be. This neighborhood and all that it contained, from its cheery Welcome! sign to the wet market, smelling of sea and flesh and earth. It was all she had known for years. This neighborhood contains all of my life, our lives, and we’re going to die within it.
She had delivered this speech in her head that night as she tried to fall sleep, wishing all the while that she had got up the courage to say all this to the housing officer who hadn’t bothered to look at either of them in the face the entire time.
This is what growing old is like, she thought now, staring at the hordes of people streaming in and out of the mall. Being surrounded by more and more alien objects, small, sharp-edged, and shiny all at once, until one day it simply becomes too uncomfortable to sit among all this strangeness. This was how the Old One looked in his last few weeks—uncomfortable. He had no intention of moving into Block 6A, bright orange and built just for the elderly.
“No one is going to make me move,” he kept saying. “I’m staying right here, where my home is. Elderly people living with other useless elderly people, what a foolish idea. At least where we live now, the next-door neighbors would come and help if we were in trouble, if one of us fell down. What if something happened to us in that Old People’s Housing Estate? Who would come and help? No one would hear us. And if we were lucky, someone with arthritic knees.”
Eventually, the housing officer got him to sign by hinting at the possibility of a court case. “It will be very inconvenient for everyone involved,” the man had added, flapping the end of his tie and looking at the tips of his too-shiny leather shoes. When he left, Soon Wei had sunk into himself, as if someone had let all the air out of him.
To cheer him up, Wang Di had gone to the market that afternoon for chicken wings, coconut milk, and freshly-ground curry paste for his favorite meal. She arrived home to see him seated at the kitchen table with his sewing box in front of him, lid off, spools of white, blue, and gray thread rolling away from him.
“Look,” he said, happy as a child in a sandpit. “Look what I found.”
The table was spread with photos, ID cards, letters, and newspaper clippings that she couldn’t read. There was more underneath the bric-a-brac, but he took one photo from the pile and handed it to her. “See who it is.”
The paper was thin, its four corners bent soft. A young woman, dressed and made up in clothes and makeup that clearly belonged to someone else. She was perched on the edge of a wooden chair, looking just off-camera, in a way that suggested that she was about to ask if it was done and could she move or get up now. Her mother had spent the entire morning coaxing the tapered ends on both sides of her face so that they curled around her jawline. Her fringe, normally pinned back from her face, had been combed forward, as if to ensure the looker that she had plenty of hair, really. Wang Di hadn’t seen the photo in more than half a century but she remembered why her hair had been cropped. Two decades later, in the 60s, the length would be fashionable, but that day it had taken the photographer more than a moment to recover from his shock at seeing her.
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen. My mother had to save up for weeks to be able to afford it.”
What she did not say: that Auntie Tin had given out copies the year the picture was taken and not had much luck. That she had reused the same photo, which Wang Di’s mother had kept in her dresser drawer for almost four years, when Wang Di was twenty. A little old, in those days. It was something her mother had worried about until Auntie Tin told them that she had found the perfect man. Thirty-eight years old. Recently widowed. Not Hokkien. Teochew. But still heaven-sent.
“This was taken a few months after the occupation.”
“You weren’t the only one. I remember my neighbors were hurrying to get husbands for their daughters. People getting married after curfew, in the dark. Strange times.”
“You were still married then, weren’t you?”
He nodded, a faraway sadness settling around his shoulders. “And then years later, I met you.”
“Years later.”
“Almost a lifetime.”