Sometimes you don’t realize that you have been waiting for something, sitting patiently for years and years, like looking out for the postman when you are expecting an important letter. You don’t know until it arrives on your doorstep and stares you in the face. There is wanting and there is a kind of waiting drenched in hope. Like Wang Di’s name, “welcoming a brother.” The wait for someone who didn’t exist yet. Who might not ever exist, but was longed for.
She had been waiting for so many years that it was almost no surprise when the boy called. The coming rain had driven her home, the sureness of it in the metal of the air, in the sound of the trees, the dry ache in her bones. When she heard the phone ring she was still turning her key in the lock and it took some time for her to slip out of her shoes and reach the phone, so she fully expected to hear nothing by the time she said hello. But when she did and she heard his voice, she could tell who he was even before he told her.
“Hello? Is this Mrs. Chia? The wife of Chia Soon Wei?”
“Yes, yes,” she’d breathed.
“I think—I think I might be your grandson.”
He didn’t sound sure. But she knew who he was. The Old One, she thought. Or more accurately, a form of him. You can meet someone’s aunt or nephew or cousin and wonder how these two people could be related, they were nothing like one another. And you could meet two people and see at once which parts of them were exactly the same. (Their eyes, the way they talked and walked, she told him much later.)
When they agreed that he would come and visit straightaway, Wang Di didn’t want to hang up for fear that the boy was just an elaborate daydream or he would get off the phone and change his mind about coming to see her. So she sat there listening to the phone go boop boop boop in her ear for a minute before she got to her feet, wishing that someone else could have been there to tell her if this was really happening. She stood up, sat down again, and stood up to go to the kitchen. She filled the kettle and forgot to put it on the fire. Dropped freshly laundered clothes in the washbasin before realizing that they were clean. “Oh, stupid, stupid,” she said, rescuing an undershirt and a pair of trousers, poking a finger at a blue-and-white blouse that was darkening wet. “I could have changed into that.” She sighed, pinching her collar to her nose to see if it smelled old, of heat and sweat. “Stupid,” she said again.
Then she gave up and gave in. Stood by the door to keep watch. When he appeared at the far end of the corridor, squinting at the numbers on the doors, she unlocked the gate and threw it open so he could see her. And he did, walking up to her determinedly, with a bowlegged gait, stopping only to shed his flip-flops and leave his umbrella outside the door. He walked straight in. The way someone might if they were used to how it looked inside her apartment. The way the Old One had, closing one dark eye to the mess. It didn’t matter. The boy didn’t care. He smiled. It was only when Wang Di tried to smile back, the corners of her lips trembling with effort, that she realized how nervous she was.
Watching him standing in the middle of the apartment she realized her legs were getting noodly-soft and she wanted to pull him to her and hold him there. She wanted to laugh and weep and cover her face with her hands, or at the very least, hold on to his arm as they talked. But she did none of that.
Instead, she cleared her throat for the fifth time and said, “My name is Wang Di.”
“My name is Kevin. Kevin Lim Wei Han.” He stuck out his hand.
She stuck out hers. A plump, warm hand and a rough, twisty-barked one met. They shook. Wang Di didn’t want to let go but she did.
“Do you want something to drink? Milo?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
She ran into the kitchen, rummaging and tipping things over until she found the green Milo tin. A chocolaty malt smell filled the kitchen. Ten cardboard-tasting biscuits next to the hot mug. When she got back, he was standing up, looking at the news clippings that the Old One had cut out, that she had put up again on these pristine new walls just days ago. The woman in a traditional Korean dress stared back at them.
She could hear the Old One’s voice in her head, so close that she had to open her own mouth and spit out his words. “That—” she pointed “—is a review of a book about comfort women. And that one is an article about how the comfort women in South Korea have been demonstrating. But they’re dying, the witnesses, one by one.”
He had nodded and nodded and looked at her with eyes just like the Old One’s. Like he understood everything. Right then.
They sat back down again and it was all she could do to stop herself from smoothing his hair, and later, from staring as he ate all the crackers she had laid out. Wang Di smiled just watching him eat. It was only when she quieted down, got used to the fact of the boy being in her flat, that she noticed the little tape recorder in his hand. When she asked him what it was for, he looked at the gadget as if seeing it for the first time.
“I’m using it to remember things. Like a daily journal. It’s not that I’m going to forget this,” he said, “or anything that you say. It’s just...a habit. Like I can’t help it anymore.”
She nodded. She knew all about habits that couldn’t be helped.
The boy drank the last, sweetest dregs of his Milo and swallowed. “I’m here because my grandmother told me... She said she took my father from his parents during the war. She told me this and then she passed away.”
She bobbed and bobbed her head to make him go on.
“But she did it to save him. She thought his parents were dead.” He picked up his schoolbag from the floor, unzipped the top and got out a bundle of letters, spreading them out on his lap to show Wang Di. “She wrote all of these. She wanted my father to read them after she died but I was the one who found them instead...” Here he shrugged, a gesture that made him look older than he really was. Then he took out a picture and pointed at a face in it. “And that one. That’s my father.”
Wang Di wanted to tell him that the picture looked like a facsimile of the one Auntie Tin had given her—and how much the man in the picture looked like Soon Wei when she met him for the first time. She remembered him walking into her parents’ home, dipping his head out of shyness. She wanted to say all this but a thickness had filled up her throat and she found she could only smile and nod, smile and nod; tears gathered up behind her eyes, blinding her.
Kevin waited until he was sure the tears in her eyes were gone before he took a deep breath. “Was it—Did you lose a child? During the war?”
“Yes.”
“So it’s true. He’s my grandfather. And you’re my grandmother.”
Wang Di shook her head. “It wasn’t your father I lost. Soon Wei and I never had a child together. I was his second wife. His first wife died in the war. I—I don’t know how she died. I never let him tell me.”
“Oh,” the boy said, looking unsurprised, as though he were used to things not going his way, was, at his age (ten? eleven? Wang Di guessed), already sober to the fact of disappointments, of little things never quite adding up, of questions never getting answered, and never having any control over what was going to happen.
It made him seem older beyond his years, old and young in a way that children looked sometimes, when they smiled as little as Kevin did. It had only taken her more than fifty years, she thought, and what was fifty, when the words of the people you grew up with mattered so much they formed the breadth and depth of your life, shaped the path ahead of you. All of it had begun with her waking to the world, the name she had been given. The fact of her upbringing. And then, after the horror during what was supposed to be her best years, how her mother’s words, the shame foisted on her by herself, her family, and everyone around her, had dictated the silence that shadowed her every move after the war. And it was this that made her try to explain it all to Kevin the way she would have in the very beginning with her husband if she’d had the courage to.
It was near evening when the boy stood up. He said he had to leave. Wang Di nodded, of course, of course. Then, “Does your father know all this?”
“No. I did this on my own, mostly.” He stopped then, the realization and the following pride of what he had just said spreading through his chest, up to his face in a slow smile. “I’m going to tell my father though. He will want to know. Can I—can we—come back to visit? After I tell him? I’m sure he’ll want to talk...”
“Yes, of course, of course.”
Wang Di was sure she would never see him again. She stood outside, watching his back receding down the corridor. There was a ping and the boy waved one last time before stepping out of sight and letting the lift take him down with it.