storms and tides and tangle of nets that we lived with every day.
All of us worked at the mercy of the elements – the storms, floods, snakes, worms that burrow into your feet. Nature is beautiful when you look at it from afar, or from a car that passes through it with the windows rolled up. When you have to work outdoors it doesn’t seem so beautiful. Yesterday I read an article on Facebook that said: We should all spend more time outside! I looked at the photos of people walking in parks, hugging, drinking water from small bottles, eating slices of watermelon. Lying down on the grass without a mat, without shielding their faces from the sun. Everyone was having fun, no one was sweating or getting heat exhaustion. There were all kinds of people in the photos. Asian, African, every colour under the sun – but they were all behaving like white people. I mean, who else actually enjoys going out into the wilderness apart from these crazy angmoh? You get a day off work, you want to go out into the jungle? Those happy Westerners, they don’t know what ‘outdoors’ is like around here.
I remember once, when I was thirteen, fourteen – old enough to have started feeling that if I didn’t escape the village I would go mad – I spent a whole day cycling as far as I could, in every direction I could think of. I went inland into the plantations in the shade of the palm-oil trees until the mud tracks got too soft for me to cycle. I looked ahead of me, thinking, How long would I have to cycle before I came out on the other side of the estate? I could only see the perfect rows of trees disappearing into the darkness, so I headed back to the coast, cycling along the dirt path that ran along the rocky shoreline, the red earth staining my toes. All the way to Sekinchan and beyond, that was all I could see: red earth, rocks and mud, the sea stretching back towards Indonesia, so flat and shallow, like a sheet of silver without end. No wind. No shade. The sun so hot on my head and arms that my skin felt stripped away with sandpaper. The light too sharp for my eyes – the same light that I’d known ever since I was a baby. I knew that all my days as an adult – every single one, to the end of my time on this earth – would be spent under that burning sun. In that moment, I suddenly got the feeling that all the things I’d ever known – my family, my home, the trees, grass, water, food, the bare earth, the huge, huge sea: everything – were strange and foreign, as if I’d never known them at all. They were mine, handed down to me at birth, the only heritage I’d ever know, and yet at that moment they didn’t seem to belong to me. This land that was supposed to be part of me, and I part of it – in that instant we felt like strangers. I didn’t want it. One day, it would kill me.
[Pause; long sigh.]
I like my life indoors now. If I had children I would make sure they never had to go outside, ever.
What made us different from the Indians who laboured in the plantations was that we worked for ourselves. If it rained we wouldn’t eat. If the catch was plentiful we could save some money and replace our worn-out shoes, buy a tarpaulin to stretch over the front yard to keep the rain out of the house – small things like that. The equation was simple for us. But they worked for the big corporations, the ones the government took over from the British. New owners, same rules. Times change but the workers’ lives never improve. They had bad pay, bad housing, no schools, had to work with poisonous chemicals all day, had no entertainment in the evenings other than to drink their home-made samsu that made them go blind and mad. But what else could they do? Run away to the city and live on the streets? At least back then they had papers. Now it’s all Bangla and Myanmar workers – I don’t think a single one of them has an ID card.
We seldom spoke about the Indians on the plantations, except to say how miserable their fate was. Poor black devils, dead but not dead – repeating these kinds of expressions made us feel that by comparison we were comfortable and easy. We never mixed with them – our lives were totally separate. We didn’t want anything to do with them, in case their misfortune rubbed off on us. All the time I was growing up, I shared the villagers’ sense of being scared of the plantation Indians because they might infect us with their poverty, and we really didn’t need any more of that in our lives. Maybe it was just another superstition that we Chinese specialise in – you know, like: Don’t look at a funeral procession or you might die too. Looking back now, I guess it was because they made us realise that we were not so different from them. So they just existed, a constant presence on the plantations over there, which is to say right next to us – a reminder of how bad things could get.
I guess you could say it was Geography’s fault that I was born into a family of fishermen – that we became who we were. But history played its part too. Like most of the people in the village, three of my grandparents arrived from Indonesia in the first years of the Second World War, when it wasn’t safe to be Chinese over there. They’d heard about the internment camps, the summary executions, young girls being raped – all the stuff I’m sure you’ve studied at college. Even I heard about that in school. They knew it might be the same story here, but they took their chances. What makes a person leave a country for another country where they could be persecuted for exactly the same thing? You get on a boat in Sumatra, cross the Melaka Straits, knowing that you could get rounded up and put in a prison camp just like you were before. Why did they do it? I’ll never know. Aiya, they made it through the war, we’re all OK now, why do you care? That was what my mother said when I asked her about my grandparents. Stuff that went on in the war – forget it. Old Chinese folk never talk about that, so don’t go asking.
For many years, my grandmother refused to register to vote. The address on her ID card was her aunt’s in Teluk Intan. She’d spent a few years there when she first got to the country, and thought of it as a sort of home. She was the youngest, barely fifteen when she arrived. I’m not sure how long exactly she spent there, but the moment she got to our village she didn’t move for the rest of her life. It’s not like the rest of us actually bothered to vote – we didn’t, or only occasionally. It would never make much difference to us – politicians change, our lives stay the same. But with my grandmother, it was more than just not caring. She actively wanted to be hidden from view. If they come for us, they won’t know where I live! I’ll have one, two, three more days to escape. That’s what she used to say. Not like the rest of you! They’ll know your address and when the time comes they’ll know where to find you. Crazy old woman. People used to laugh at her. Who’s going to come for us? No one cares about us or what we do! But she was convinced that one day there would be a government decree, a law that would be passed overnight, and everyone with a Chinese name would be rounded up and put in camps, just as they were during the war. Hey Po-po, just chill out! We have internet now! Facebook Twitter Insta Snapchat, can Skype with someone in Russia while listening to Super Junior on live stream, team-play video games with people that you never met in Harbin and Copenhagen. You actually believe that in this kind of world, we can just round up millions of people and put them in a prison camp, or kick them out of the country? You think you’ll wake up one day and hundreds of thousands of people are going to be walking across the border into Thailand with nothing but the shirts on their backs, and all the homes and villages and entire cities we’ve built, with skyscrapers and malls, are going to be abandoned, just like that? Keep up with the times, Po-po!
She wouldn’t listen. For the rest of her life, she was obsessed by keeping her address secret, thinking it would protect her when Chinese doomsday arrived. When she was very old – I’d long since moved out of the village but was back living in the area – she fell down one day while reaching up to pick a pomegranate from the small tree she’d planted outside her house. A scrawny plant that never grew well, no matter how much she looked after it. That was another one of her obsessions, that stupid plant; in the end, it nearly killed her. The small plastic stool she’d climbed up on to reach its branches was brittle and cracking, and couldn’t take her weight when she stepped on it. She fell, broke her hip and ended up in hospital. When I arrived I found there were many forms to fill in. Each time I did so, she insisted I wrote her false address. ‘What the hell is the use of doing that?’ I said. ‘If they need to do any follow-up tests they’ll go searching for you fifty miles from where you live.’
‘Good,’
