What is born out of violence ends in violence.
His family had recently moved into a place on the edge of the village, where the houses began to thin out, overwhelmed by the mangrove forests and patchy orchards struggling to thrive in the salt-soaked earth. He was only four or five years older than me, but already belonged to a different world, one I had heard and dreamed about but didn’t yet recognise, didn’t yet know was even real – it was only just starting to draw into focus in my imagination, and it was Keong who made it real. I’m talking about the city – I don’t mean Klang, which was thirty, thirty-five miles away, but Kuala Lumpur, only another ten, fifteen miles further. I’m not sure exactly, I just know that it’s the biggest fifty-mile gap you could think of.
Keong had just moved down from there, and couldn’t wait to return. His mother was from these parts – Kuala Selangor, I think – but had moved up to KL to find work. She’d got married, given birth to Keong, but then things started to get tough. Eventually she got divorced, and soon she was struggling. A young woman with a fourteen-year-old kid on her hands – you don’t need a PhD to figure out it’s a bad situation that’s only going to get worse. A Chinese boy in the city with no money and no parents to keep him in check – they only do one thing. Join a gang.
It wasn’t long after his parents got divorced that Keong started cutting class – a couple of lessons here, a half-day there, then whole days and even entire weeks. He might as well have quit school completely. He told me how he’d once strolled into class late, in the middle of the lesson, while the teacher was explaining how the earth’s land masses are built on continental plates that are constantly shifting and pushing against each other – he remembered the neat picture she was drawing on the board, remembered thinking, Maybe I should just pick up a piece of chalk and mess it up right now. She was so shocked by how cool and brazen he was, sauntering in halfway through class, that she just stopped talking, her mouth hanging open. Didn’t dare challenge him, didn’t say a word. After a few seconds she went back to her diagram, and pretended not to notice when he put his feet up on his desk and rubbed his cock through his trousers as if to say, Fuck this, I’m bored. By then, she knew he was a gangster – a small-time gangster but a real one nonetheless, not just a bully who acted tough. His dyed coppery hair, the rings he wore – those were signs of someone you wanted to avoid. There were stories of what these boys did, even at fifteen, sixteen – stories of teachers being beaten up at the school gates, of a mean sonofabitch headmaster taking on a young tough guy and giving him a public caning at morning assembly, and the next day finding his car on fire. A giant ball of flames and black smoke that you could see five miles away. Bang. Three years’ salary, gone.
One day he walks in and blows a kiss at the teacher. She knows all about him, knows his reputation, so she ignores him. She knows that he does this all the time: strolls in late, puts his feet on the desk, rubs his crotch, makes loud comments that distract the other boys. She says nothing. The only volcanic pressure I know is right here, he says loudly, pointing between his legs. The other boys laugh, throw scrunched-up paper balls at each other. Still the teacher says nothing; she carries on talking, through the laughter and disruption. When the boys have calmed down, Keong takes out a pack of Salems, carefully puts one between his lips and closes his eyes, as if he’s taking a nap. Waits for a reprimand, but the teacher says nothing. Maybe she doesn’t care – why would she care about him? Then he takes out a lighter – its flame is blue and dances like a demon as he lights his cigarette and takes a deep, deep drag. He sees the teacher staring at him through the cloud of silver smoke. Ooooooohhhh. The other boys’ low moan is both a sign of respect and a challenge – respect for him, challenge for the teacher. Still she says nothing. She stands staring at the class, piece of chalk in hand, then walks out the door. (Crying – she was crying! Keong laughed as he told me this story.) A couple of weeks later, Keong is expelled from school. No big deal, he thinks. I was going to drop out soon anyway.
Facing his mum is another matter. Every morning, even after he is expelled, he puts on his uniform and pretends he’s going to school. He has his rucksack with him, slung over one shoulder, trying to look serious. His mother asks him how things are going at school, and he says, OK, not so bad. Maths is fine, I like maths. Geography is fun too. He means it, too, because – here’s the thing – he thinks more about class and about his lessons now that he has been expelled than he ever did when he was at school. When his mother smiles and says, ‘Good boy. Education is your future. Study hard so that you don’t end up like me,’ he feels a sudden quickening of his pulse, the guilt cutting at his insides like the knife he has started to carry around for the gang fights that he will very soon get involved in.
(At this precise point in time his mother is between jobs. Every morning she goes out in search of work, every day she comes back with nothing to show but a promise of work that never comes true. This lasts about a month, until she becomes a shampoo girl at a salon in Cheras called Angelique D’Style.)
He decides to get some cash. It’s the only way to relieve his guilt. (This is my analysis of his situation, not his – he never talked much about things like guilt or obligation.) By this time he’s hanging around with boys who are nineteen, twenty, even a bit older. They’ve been running businesses for a few years, selling fake DVDs, small electronics – you know the type. Their friends and associates own stalls all over the city, Chow Kit Road, Low Yat Plaza, the top floor of Sungai Wang, you name it. But mainly their money comes from drugs – the boys are low-level dealers. Syabu, fengtau, ice, G, K – whatever name it goes by, they sell it.
You’re looking at me like you don’t know what all that is. Amphetamines, in all their forms, streaming over the border from Laos and Thailand. There would have been harder, more expensive stuff floating around too, heroin and coke I guess, but Keong and his friends wouldn’t have got their hands on that kind of junk so often, if ever at all. He’s still a kid, remember, barely sixteen. The cash he makes is small change for a serious dealer. Most of the time he just sits at the front of a cramped stall in Bukit Bintang selling portable electronics, Discmans, VCR players, Nintendo – the sort of thing every other stall in the area seems to sell. Every so often someone asks him for some pills, and he casually walks over to another stall fifty yards away, and after a few minutes one of his friends will come over with a small packet. Sometimes he’s the runner, carrying a plastic sachet from one place to another. He’s young enough for the police to ignore.
Still, the money he makes allows him to buy new clothes, the kind all the young gangsters favour – ‘carrot-cut’ trousers, baggy around the ass and clinging tightly to the ankles, shirts with sharp shoulders, a small diamond stud in his left ear. He wants to look like Alan Tam Wing-Lun or one of the other Hong Kong singing superstars. He does look like Alan Tam! That’s what he thinks. But really – even I could see it when he proudly showed me photos of him and his heng tai, who were not really his brothers in any sense of the word, because they wouldn’t come to his aid when he needed them – he ends up with the look that his teachers at school would identify as samseng or Ah Beng. Boys who will soon quit school and become stallholders or dim sum waiters on the outside, petty gangsters on the inside.
One evening Keong is delivering some bundles of cash to a building in Jalan Pudu – he doesn’t know who or what the money’s for. He’s just been given the address, which he’s committed to memory so he doesn’t have to write it on his palm like he did the last time. Sor hai, no brain, meh? his friends had teased him (how innocent and stupid he’d been!). He’s only delivering a thousand ringgit, hardly enough to buy a decent second-hand scooter, but still, not worth taking the risk. Not that Keong recognises much risk – he feels invincible these days, with his band of brothers and cash in his pocket. It comes as a surprise when two police motorbikes pull up ahead of him – big powerful white bikes, surprisingly quiet, unlike the noisy scooters that his friends ride. He assumes they’ve stopped for someone else, or are just taking a break for an early-evening drink, but instead they walk swiftly towards him, backing him up against the wall. He doesn’t care, he acts tough. Why you stopping me? he says,
