Conversations

Mrs. Ho always had a hard time getting to the Guang Ming Shan temple on her own. From Bedok, where she lived, there was a change of trains at City Hall, going from green line to red. Alighting from the train at Bishan and pushing through the crowd, she often had trouble finding her way through the maze of underground shops that linked the station to a shopping mall. Signs everywhere, pointing this way and that, were confusing enough, even if Mrs. Ho were not distracted by some of the merchandise on display or drawn in by the smells of steamed corn and bak chor mee wafting from the food stalls. She never stopped to ask for directions but instead relied on her memory and instinct to get her out of the maze, up the right escalator, to the first floor, where she could get a better sense of her bearings and then a bus to the temple.

She usually made the trip on a weekday when her son was at work. She could easily have asked him to drive her there on a Saturday—too many people on Sundays—but she didn’t want to impose on him, knowing that he had to work late into the night on weekdays and often slept in on weekends. Her daughter was married, burdened with three children of her own, and lived in Choa Chu Kang, which, in Mrs. Ho’s mind, was so far away it felt like it was in a different country. You can take a taxi lah, I’ll pay for it, her daughter had told her, but Mrs. Ho had refused each time. No need to waste money like that. When she did visit, which was rare, her son-in-law would pick her up, disguising his annoyance at the task with brisk, strained solicitousness. Her daughter would fuss over her and feed her heavily salted soups made from ready-to- cook packs, and also deep-fried chicken. There were always deep-fried foods at every meal. The kids love them, her daughter said, and they’re the easiest to cook, only need to fry them up. Mrs. Ho had to refrain from commenting on her daughter’s cooking or her parenting, given that the few times she had brought up these issues with her daughter, the latter had turned loud and defensive and teary, refusing to listen. You don’t understand how hard it is now, Ma, you don’t know what I have to do to keep the family together, how hard I have to try.

Since then, Mrs. Ho had not stepped in when she saw her daughter’s two sons getting into a fight over a toy gun or when her eldest granddaughter’s weight ballooned. It’s not my business to meddle, she would remind herself. I don’t have to interfere. Whenever she felt the need to intervene or nag, Mrs. Ho would turn away, leave the room, and utter not a single word about the things she had no control or influence over.

When she finally found the correct berth to wait for the bus, Mrs. Ho would look up time and again to check the digital display, to reconfirm the bus number, to study the approximate arrival time. On her first solo trip to the temple, she had made a blunder of the last digit of the bus and didn’t realize her mistake until she was somewhere in Balestier. That was a nightmare, trying to find the right stop for the bus that would shuttle her back to the interchange. By the time she had arrived at the temple, she was flustered and angry with herself, the day half-gone.

Today, only after she got on the bus and checked the destination with the driver could Mrs. Ho finally relax, loosening up just a bit. It was only a ten-minute ride, and Mrs. Ho silently ticked off the familiar landmarks: the all-boys school on the left, then the small park and grass field on the right, the foursquare building of the Salvation Army with its tents of donated items near a traffic-light junction. Mrs. Ho sat near the exit, on the outer seat, her hand on the rail where the buzzer was. She would adjust her body to let someone take the inner seat, though that seat usually remained vacant. If she timed her ride correctly, midmorning being best, the bus would be half-empty, its passengers mostly housewives out on their grocery runs or middle-aged men with their phones, fully absorbed in their game apps or videos, the volume cranked up to raucous, maddening levels.

During the short ride Mrs. Ho kept up the conversations in her head, first with her husband, then her son. She began each conversation lightly, starting with easy topics before moving into the well-worn furrows of fond remembrances and old stories. There was a staunch comfort to this habit, something to keep her mind focused, much like the verses of the Diamond Sutra she muttered to herself on days she couldn’t keep ahold of her thoughts. Days when her mind took her down into dark valleys and fissures, into the past. The conversations with her late husband and son were pleasant enough, temperate, mundane. There was nothing to trouble her in the things she had to tell them; she held sway, was in control of the flow. Before the bus reached the stop outside the Guang Ming Shan temple, Mrs. Ho ended the conversations, wiped her mind clean of any residual thoughts, and got ready to alight. These moments, just before she arrived and started, all over again, the search for her husband’s and son’s wall niches in the huge sprawling compound of the temple, were the only things in her long journey that felt real and comforting to her, a balm for her frazzled nerves.

During evening chats with her next-door neighbor of fifteen years, Mrs. Ho mentioned the visits to the temple briefly, but every time she did, Mrs. Wang would break into yet another lengthy tirade about the death of her own husband, four years ago, from a stroke, an experience still fresh. First, her shock at discovering him dead in the bathroom, then another at the expenses of a three-day funeral wake at the void deck of the flat and a suitable niche at a private columbarium.

Death is not cheap, Mrs. Wang would conclude, not in Singapore; everyone has to pay. Mrs. Ho would nod and tut-tut appropriately. They had both attended the other’s spouse’s wake, had each offered the other their deepest condolences. Mrs. Wang was also there for Mrs. Ho’s son’s funeral, something kept on the hush, staged at one of the parlors along Lavender Street instead of at the void deck. She had sat beside Mrs. Ho throughout the three days, a solid, solemn presence, so unlike her usual chatty self. Kind words, a hand on her back that Mrs. Ho was too weary to shrug off.

“There’s so much I want to say to him, even now,” Mrs. Wang said one evening. “Even when he’s dead.”

“It’s common,” Mrs. Ho said, turning to regard her. Mrs. Wang had taken an orange out of a plastic shopping bag full of them and was slowly peeling it. She pushed the bag toward Mrs. Ho, nudging her to take one. They usually brought some food with them for their chats: a packet of vanilla-cream biscuits, sour plums, a clutch of lychees or longans. Mrs. Ho took one politely.

“And every time I think about what I want to say to him, I become so angry and just want to yell at him, like I always did,” Mrs. Wang said, letting out a yelp of laughter. “He still makes me so angry sometimes, the way he did certain things and forgot other things. To die on me like that, I don’t think I can forgive him.” Again, another hoot, and Mrs. Ho remembered to smile. Mrs. Wang took a small bite of the peeled orange, the air between them scented with a light citrusy mist.

Mrs. Ho had not always liked Mrs. Wang and early on had avoided her whenever she could. Mrs. Wang was loud and brash, unchecked in actions and words, never one to hold back when it came to gossip. Angular in face, her graying hair pulled into a severe bun, she came across as stern and critical, her gaze at times proud, condescending. She wore loose floral-print blouses and dark pants and open-toed sandals. Quarrelsome—that was Mrs. Ho’s first impression, gleaned from Mrs. Wang’s hard features. Someone who would pick a fight with you, provoked or not, someone who would put a person in his place. Yet she had succumbed to the woman, whose natural gregariousness and force of personality had made it impossible for Mrs. Ho to turn her away. One day, she realized she didn’t have to, her sense of wariness diminished.

“Yes, it’s sometimes hard to imagine them gone,” Mrs. Ho said, after a pause, then added: “There’s nothing wrong in wanting to talk to them more.”

“That’s what I tell my son too. He thinks I’m crazy when I do that, mumbling to myself. But you can’t really help yourself. He’ll just appear, and you just have to have a word with him, one more time, you know?”

“You’re not crazy.”

“And it’s not like I do that all the time.”

“No.”

Mrs. Ho rested her lips on a sliver of orange, thought of adding more to the topic, and decided to refrain. She didn’t feel it was right to pry into Mrs. Wang’s life and, in the same vein, felt it was inappropriate to give Mrs. Wang an opening to hers. Her situation was entirely different from Mrs. Wang’s, and what she did in her own privacy wasn’t in any way similar. For one, she would never think of raising her voice to her late husband, or her son, now. She wanted to express other things— befuddlement, regret—but not anger, no, nor resentment.

“And you? Ever had any conversation with him?” Mrs. Wang asked.

Mrs. Ho wondered whom Mrs. Wang had in mind, but it was the face of her son, Wee Song, that surfaced in her memory, the one from the photograph for his wake, several years younger than when he died, a child. There was nothing in that clean, cherubic face of the hardened, vacant features that came to dominate his final years, what she usually remembered during the conversations. How long might it take to substitute one thing for another, to replace her memory of her son as he was when he died with another from a more distant past? Mrs. Ho feared the gradual loss of her ability to recall her son clearly, but mostly she feared she had willfully chosen to remember only what she wanted and had made herself ignorant of the truth of Wee Song.

“Ah, I’m talking too much,” Mrs. Wang said, taking up another orange. “You want to share this with me? I can’t finish another on my own.”

Mrs. Ho shook her head but in the end accepted her half of the orange when Mrs. Wang offered it again, pushing it into her hand. Mrs. Ho chewed on the whole thing, without splitting it into segments, biting down on the little nubs of seeds, grinding them into a bitter mash.

“They don’t say anything back,” Mrs. Ho said eventually. She didn’t know what she wanted to say until the words were out of her mouth.

“No, they don’t. All they do is repeat themselves all over again,” Mrs. Ho replied, “doing and saying the same old things.”

Mrs. Ho had wanted Wee Song to talk back to her, had wanted him to help her make sense of the things she couldn’t quite understand. She had needed him to hurl at her with his words, with accusation, all his buried pain. But all she had received so far was his silence. The same silence he had brandished like a shield in the last months before he leaped and took his life elsewhere. All she could hear was her own words, repeating themselves inside her, an incantation that never seemed to cease.

“Yes, always the same things,” Mrs. Ho parroted softly.

Mrs. Wang reached out to pat the hand of Mrs. Ho, who bore the touch as stoically as she could, swallowing the acrid bile in her mouth.

She had Wee Song when she was nearly forty. The news of the pregnancy had surprised her and her late husband. Li Ann and Wee Meng were fifteen and thirteen when Wee Song was born, three weeks premature. It was a hard labor, the pain something she had entirely forgotten until it all rushed back in the heat and madness of his birth. He weighed only slightly over two kilos, a bundle of wrinkly skin and limbs, and in the harsh light of the delivery room, he had seemed a creature barely formed. She had watched him through the plastic cocoon of the incubator over several weeks, the tubes and wires extending out of him like strange foreign parts of his minuscule body, keeping him alive.

She had to relearn to be a mother of a newborn, reacquainted herself with the know-how after a bout of mistakes and oversights. She had hoped to breastfeed Wee Song as she had done for Li Ann and Wee Meng, but she wasn’t producing enough milk. You have to be patient, the postpartum nurse had advised, it’ll come. But it hadn’t, and Wee Song wasn’t putting on any weight, so she had to switch to formula.

Perhaps this lack in her own body had put her on a constant alert for the many things that came after: Wee Song’s frail health, his constant coughs and flus, the easy bruises, his skinny stork-like frame. She had plied him with traditional Chinese herbs and medicine, subjected him to rounds of acupuncture, and taken him to the temples for prayers and blessings. She had even pledged him to Guanyin as a godchild, to rope the bodhisattva in for protection. She remembered to honor the bodhisattva on special dates in the lunar calendar with a sumptuous spread of food offerings she prepared herself instead of buying them from the wet market. It was the least she could do to help Wee Song gain a stronger foothold in the world, when it felt like he could simply slip away with yet another high viral fever or an unstoppable spell of diarrhea.

Don’t coddle your son like that, her late husband had said, when she found a new herbal remedy to treat Wee Song’s persistent cough. You’re making him weaker than he is now.

What would you have done then? she asked her husband time and again, on her bus rides to the temple, when all was done and she had still lost Wee Song anyway. What would you have done in my place? How else would you have protected him? Mrs. Ho had felt chastised, judged for her actions, no, for what she was, for being a lousy, unfit mother. Still, when she thought back about all her efforts, she wasn’t sure whether any of it had done any good for Wee Song. All she could remember was her failures, her inability to give anything of substance, of lasting value, to her own son, not her milk, not even herself.

Mrs. Ho attended the session only because Li Ann had set up the appointment and called her incessantly to remind her about it. It’ll be good for you, Ma, she had said.

Good for what, Mrs. Ho had wanted to ask. Grief counseling. She didn’t need it when her husband died, so what was the point, really, this time round? A death is a death, and you just cope with it. Her husband would have told her that blankly, without fuss. He would have gone on with his life, no talk about feelings and emotions and what-have-yous. Which were exactly what the counselor asked about, when Mrs. Ho sat before her in a sparsely furnished office, across a tidy desk, her hands affixed to her lap. “How are you feeling now?”

How did she feel? Mrs. Ho looked at the thin pale lips of the counselor—were they told not to wear makeup during sessions with their patients? she wondered, and balked at the idea of her being a patient herself—and noted the plainness of the woman’s features: a large flat nose, dark lumpy eye bags, ashen complexion. Before she had taken a seat, Mrs. Ho had surveyed the careful layout of the items on the desk, folders in neat stacks, a tin can of color pens, photo frames. Two boys, a few years apart, squinting, smiling. A squat wide-hipped man with an arm across the counselor’s shoulders, a too-wide grin on his face. The boys took after the father, fortunately, Mrs. Ho surmised. Not ugly, but not attractive either. The counselor repeated her question, softer this time, and when Mrs. Ho again didn’t reply, took a different stance:

“How are you doing these days?”

Mrs. Ho sighed. “I’m fine.”

“How long has it—”

“Three months.”

“How do you feel—”

“I feel fine.”

Mrs. Ho felt a flare of anger. Why had her daughter thought she needed this? She had not talked with Li Ann and Wee Meng about the matter, not much anyway, which was just how Mrs. Ho wanted it, to let the whole thing go, without making an issue of it. Talk, talk, talk—where would it go, what would it achieve in the end? All they wanted these days was to talk and talk, just words running along, doing nothing. Her thoughts, ceaseless and repetitious, already hounded her day in and day out; she didn’t need someone else, a stranger no less, to tell her what she ought to feel, or worse, to put up with the shame of sharing her feelings.

Mrs. Ho sat tight-lipped through most of the session but ended it twenty minutes early, citing a terrible headache. The counselor got up as Mrs. Ho rose from her seat, and came round the desk. Mrs. Ho barely got time to say a brisk goodbye before she turned her back and left the room, the pain in her stomach like a gut punch.

Her late husband had signed Wee Song up for tuition classes in the neighborhood, after he’d done badly in his Primary Three exams, failing English and maths. Four days a week, including weekends, three hours each time. Mrs. Ho brought him to these classes after school, allowing him to choose what he wanted to eat for lunch as well as a snack during class. It was always a mad scramble, an hour from picking him up from school to dropping him at the tuition center, and there never seemed to be enough time for them to sit down for a proper meal before they had to rush off again. He needs to learn how to deal with this kind of stress now, her husband had said. How else do you think he can handle it next time, when he’s older?

Mrs. Ho went along with her husband’s decision for a while, though she wasn’t sure whether Wee Song could handle the amount of work. His school grades improved slightly after two months but weren’t something to shout about. He developed a habit of peeling bits of skin from his lips and fingers during that time, a tic that Mrs. Ho tried to discourage by daubing tea-tree-oil balm on his lips, trimming the fraying skin off his fingers, and applying an ointment that caused her son to squirm in pain. This stopped him briefly, before she noticed the red tears reappearing on his lips. She then tried threats, negotiation, treats, all of which worked, but only temporarily. She could not recall her two older children giving her this sort of problem when they were younger, Li Ann being a temperate child and Wee Meng always toeing the line, naughty, yes, but within reasonable limits. It was only when her husband got involved, after seeing the dark crimson peeled skin on Wee Song’s fingers—like different layers of onion skin, she thought—that the matter was finally alleviated. Ten strikes of a metal ruler on each palm. Twice, Wee Song had relapsed, but after those instances, he managed to restrain himself. Mrs. Ho didn’t intervene in those beatings, though afterward she would cool Wee Song’s reddened palms with ice and cold water, the boy clinging to her for dear life.

With the improvements in Wee Song’s grades, Mrs. Ho, after consulting with her husband, decided to cut down on the classes and find someone for one-to-one private sessions at home. She knew Mrs. Wang’s daughter, Pei Feng, was a newly minted primary school teacher, and approached her. She reluctantly agreed to come over twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, for two hours, to tutor the boy on English, maths, and science. Mrs. Ho would lay out a plate of marble cake or ang ku kuehs and mugs of Milo on the study table before each session, quietly closing the door behind her. She then sat on the sofa in the living room, flipping through a cooking magazine or taking a short nap. Occasionally, she could hear short snippets of conversations, though the words were too faint to make out.

After the tuition ended, Mrs. Ho would walk Pei Feng back to her flat, just next door, and inquire about the boy’s progress. She received the same unwavering replies: he’s picking up things slowly but steadily, he’s a keen learner. At the end of each month, when she paid Pei Feng, Mrs. Ho would make sure to add an extra fifty dollars to the agreed amount, as an appreciative gesture. Pei Feng would put up a showy refusal, but Mrs. Ho would insist every time, pushing the money into her hands.

In Wee Song’s report book at the end of that year, his form teacher wrote: Wee Song’s grades have improved significantly and he displays an enthusiastic interest in arts and science. A quiet, observant boy, he needs to learn to speak up more in class.To reward him, her husband brought Wee Song out for a meal at Swensen’s, while Mrs. Ho gave him a new Transformers pencil case and schoolbag. The boy accepted these with a nod and a shy smile. He had become quieter over that year, his manners more subdued, as if tamed, all of which Mrs. Ho noticed. She also noted that the boy had shot up by seven centimeters, which she had marked on a wall in his room, a series of pencil dashes and dates. He’s growing up well, she thought, such a dear sweet boy.

Li Ann called her a day after the counseling session and after giving a long monologue about her busy week finally settled down to the reason for her call: “How was it?” Her daughter’s voice reedy, entreating. Mrs. Ho made a noise at the back of her throat and mumbled an indiscernible reply. “What, Ma? I can’t hear you,” her daughter said, and then over a muffled silence, Mrs. Ho could hear her screaming at someone in the background. There was a shout or a cry—which of her daughter’s children was it?— then her daughter’s voice came rumbling into her ears: “Ma, what did you say just now?”

Lately, Mrs. Ho had found her daughter’s behavior more off-putting, even overbearing, which made it harder for her to feel anything for her when she groused about the children, the housework, her husband. Li Ann, who had once been the vice-president of the debate team in junior college, had channeled her formidable skill in parsing and defending any social issue into constant complaints about her lot in life, how tough it was, how little time she had, how everything was a mess she’d have to clean up. Her daughter, once a charming, good-humored child, had coarsened over the years of her own motherhood, had become rancorous, rancid.

“I said it’s okay,” Mrs. Ho said, an undertone of irritation seeping into her voice.

“Just okay? That’s all? Can’t be just that. What did you guys talk about?” Li Ann asked.

“Nothing much.”

“Ma, it can’t be nothing lah, an hour leh, surely she had asked you about . . . talked to you about certain things. She must have.”

“She didn’t ask me anything.”

“Ma.”

“What else do you want me to say?”

Mrs. Ho held the phone away from her face, almost in disgust. Then she swiftly dismissed the rest of her daughter’s queries and hastily ended the call. She felt winded at the end of it. Her daughter’s calls always made her feel exhausted, sapped to the core. She had no need to know more about how she was struggling; that was the way things went, managing one’s life and its troubles—you deal with them and you move on. What you can’t handle, you leave it be. Why this inane obsession with broadcasting it to someone else, making a big fuss, as if your troubles were any different from others’? You didn’t lose a leg or an arm, you wouldn’t die, you didn’t die. These were what Mrs. Ho had wanted to say, at one point or another, but had held back. It would not help if the words came out wrongly or were misinterpreted.

Mrs. Ho sometimes thought about which of her children—her remaining ones—she would give up if she had the power to choose, which she would substitute for Wee Song, to have him back. Li Ann, for obvious reasons, but her daughter was, after all, a mother, and what would happen to her kids if she were gone? Wee Meng, her first son, the one adored by her late husband for the resemblance to himself, excelling in sports and studies—his birth had brought a huge relief to Mrs. Ho, since her firstborn, a daughter, was a disappointment to her in-laws. Wee Meng, whose stages in life were well tracked by his grandparents and father, was a darling in everyone’s eye, a golden boy; perhaps this was the reason, though Mrs. Ho found it hard to admit, that she had always felt distant from him. She knew she loved him—she knew his every need and had striven to meet each one—but the love was purely maternal, quotidian in nature. She was only doing what she needed to do.

But Wee Song. He was different; he was the child that Mrs. Ho had wanted. Maybe it was his fragility, his vulnerability, from a young age. He was fully dependent on her, and she experienced an urgent, primal need to care for him. He was the one who made her a mother—not Li Ann or Wee Meng, whose pressing, fractious demands, as children then adults, only sapped her dry. His presence was like a vital organ, one Mrs. Ho depended on for her survival. And when he decided to end his life—why? for what reason? Mrs. Ho would never know—it felt like a sudden, violent ripping out of the thing that had kept her alive over the years, leaving behind a vacuum that she no longer knew how to fill.

As Wee Song grew up, he became the point of contention between Mrs. Ho and her husband. The latter often found faults, mild ones at first, before the more obvious issues, targeting Mrs. Ho’s coddling manner. “Nothing good can come out of this sort of mothering,” he had said, “this overprotectiveness.”

Mothering—the force with which he had spit out that word, as if it were something poisonous that had darkened his tongue. As if it were something illicit, forbidden, a cruel, ugly act.

“He’s different from his siblings, he needs more attention,” Mrs. Ho said, exasperatedly. “He has a poor health, you know that, from young, he’s just what he is.”

“And he’s getting weaker ’cause of you, and I don’t mean his health. Everything about him is weak; he can’t stand on his two feet if you’re not there.”

“Then what do you suppose we, no, what you should do uh?”

“You’re the one who should stop doing things for him for once. Just let him stand on his own. He’s already twelve; he’s not a baby anymore. You don’t have to be so overprotective, that’s what I’m saying.”

“If I don’t watch over him, who will? You?”

“You’re doing more harm to him, and you know that.”

“What harm, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You and your mothering!”

How Mrs. Ho had hated that word, how she had wanted to throw it back at her husband. As if the man knew anything about what she was doing, or why. He was a weak father, negligent and distant. Judging, judgmental—always picking out her faults, her flaws, and her son’s too.

Another time, another fight.

“The boy won’t make it in life, clinging to you like that all the time, a mummy’s boy.”

“You don’t know that, all you see is his—”

“I’ve seen enough people, and I know. He won’t make it anywhere, he’s too passive, too weak.”

Weak, as if what all of us needed to survive in this world was just strength. Feats of mindless strength, a dumb animal strength, to brave everything, Mrs. Ho thought. What nonsense.

“You’re weak too, and I don’t see you doing anything about it. Only know how to take it out on the boy, only know how to beat him and scold him all the time.”

“If I don’t do this, who will? You’ll never lay a hand on him, even if it’s for his own good.”

“What do you expect me to do then, beat him all the time for no reason? One of us has to be here for him.”

“You’ve no idea what you’re talking about! You don’t know anything.”

“Oh, and you do?”

“Yes, better than you. I tell you, one day that boy is going to suffer because of what you’re doing now, and then you’ll be the one who will truly suffer, just you see.”

Her late husband’s words often came back to her after the death of Wee Song. She had wanted so badly to block them out, but they always managed to sneak past her defenses. She first heard them when she received the news of Wee Song’s death, when he jumped from the ninth floor of their block one weekday afternoon, and then later, during the funeral wake and at the cremation. She heard them still when she looked at her son’s face in the photo frame before the casket, not recognizing any of his features. She heard them all the time after that, as if her late husband were whispering them right into her ear, relentless, unstoppable. After a while, the words meant nothing to her—at least, the sting was gone, or blunted from repetition.

Mrs. Ho thought she’d gotten over it, but three months after the cremation she heard the words again during her morning grocery shopping at the wet market. She was with Mrs. Wang, whom she had met earlier at the sio bak stall, when she felt the words sharply in her ribs. One moment, she was picking out tomatoes from a pile at the fresh vegetables stall, Mrs. Wang beside her comparing the prices of cucumbers between this stall and the supermarket a block away, barely listening to her, remembering a dish she used to make that was Wee Song’s favorite, fried eggs with tomatoes and bacon bits, and then it happened. You’re spoiling him, you’ll be the one who will suffer. And suddenly she was choking, taking sharp inhales, her cold skin prickling with needles, and Mrs. Wang was holding on to her arm, a look of puzzled concern on her face. She looked dumbly at Mrs. Wang, unable to speak.

Relieving her of her bags of groceries, Mrs. Wang led her out of the wet market and into the kopitiam at the nearby block. She ordered a cup of hot teh for her and waited for her to calm down.

“I’m sorry, so sorry, I don’t know what happened. You don’t have to do this.” She reached into her pants pocket, withdrew her purse, and waved off Mrs. Wang’s offer to pay for the tea, pushing a ten-dollar note into the drink server’s hand.

“Do what? This is nothing.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing? Aiyoh, don’t need to be so polite lah. These things happen lah.”

“I don’t know. It just . . .”

“Don’t worry, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

Mrs. Wang nudged a pack of tissues at her. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes, facing away from Mrs. Wang. What a scene she had created, she thought, and what a fool she had been. And in front of Mrs. Wang, no less. The woman would make a feast out of this, with all kinds of wrong impressions and gossip. Mrs. Wang was the last person she wanted to witness this embarrassing episode. She could not stand the scrutiny now, her questioning, her affected concern. She could not raise her eyes to meet Mrs. Wang’s, not wanting to see that priggish glint in her stare, the flagrant self-righteousness.

“Is this about Wee Song?” Mrs. Wang asked, leaning in.

“No.”

“It’s okay if it is. You just have to let it out of your system.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll take a while, I know. I also had a hard time when my husband died. These things take time.”

“Yes.”

“It’ll get better, trust me.” “Yes.”

“Such a pity; he was so young. How old was he? Seventeen, eighteen? Too young to die lah. What was he thinking?”

Mrs. Ho kept stirring her mug of tea, looking at her hands. Her mind had slipped away, her body a scooped-out shell.

“That boy, such a good boy, so polite, always greeted me every time he saw me, such a nice, friendly boy. I don’t know why he would do such a thing, though.” Mrs. Wang waited for Mrs. Ho’s next move. Seeing nothing forthcoming, she sighed, sank back into her chair, and sighed again. “Children these days, they don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. Don’t know what they’re thinking, what they’re up to. Getting into all sorts of problems. And when they can’t handle all the troubles they’ve caused, what do they do? They take the easiest way out and leave all the mess behind. For who to clear, you tell me. We lah, us, that’s who.”

Mrs. Ho wasn’t listening to any of this. She had burrowed into a place inside that was dark and empty and quiet. Nothing could reach or touch her there. On her face, there were tears, but they were there naturally, beyond her control.

Li Ann and Wee Meng said he was facing some traumatic issue, or was perhaps depressed, deeply so. They weren’t close to him, and that’s why they would say such things, Mrs. Ho felt. They had given him the shortest of diagnoses, the easiest explanation, rather than try to understand.

He was supposed to be in school that day, the last day of his first year in junior college, just before the start of the months-long holidays. She had knocked on his bedroom door before she left for the wet market and asked what he wanted for breakfast. “Anything,” he shouted through the door.

“What anything?” she asked.

His curt, annoyed reply: “Bee hoon and otak.” He had sounded tired, but it was normal; the boy stayed up late every night, always on his laptop. Some nights, Mrs. Ho would rise to get a drink of water in the kitchen at three or four and would see the light seeping through the gap under his door. She would knock and enter and find him facedown on the table, his head on his arms, the screen of his laptop crawling with threads of conversation. Online chats, chat groups, words the police had used later, which Mrs. Ho didn’t quite understand, Do you know what your son did online, on these chats? Did he say anything about it? She didn’t know a thing. Online bullying, she heard Wee Meng whisper to Li Ann, yet another bunch of words Mrs. Ho couldn’t wrap her mind around. How do people get bullied online? Isn’t that something that needs a real face or a physical body, something to hurl your words at, to push around, to hit? How does one get bullied with words—just words?—and by a stranger? It sounded ridiculous to her, ludicrous. She would have loved to laugh in the face of it, this absurd nonsense.

That morning she had heard his voice booming through the door—so clear, so full of vim, something she could not reconcile later when she received the news; no one with that kind of voice, one that screamed life, energy, vigor, would do such a thing. That boy had always had a good, strong voice, a thing inborn.

She had left the house and later came back from the wet market, laden with bags of meat and vegetables. She had bought the bee hoon and otak from a kopitiam, where she had a cup of kopi-o and a char siew bun. The police were already at the front door of the flat when she returned. She had seen the commotion at the void deck, the yellow tape marking off an area near the car park, but wasn’t curious enough to linger. And then the news, even before she stepped into the flat.

Mrs. Ho remained calm when she led the police into the living room. She should clean up a bit, the pile of laundry on the sofa, the grittiness of the floor, newspaper everywhere. Her mind felt swollen, brimming with many soft vague things—should she offer some drinks to the two policemen, boys really, with their young unblemished faces, their broad arms tight against dark blue sleeves, should she excuse herself to put away the groceries first, should she switch on the wall fan, after all it’s becoming quite a hot, insufferable day, she’s already perspiring like mad—and nothing seemed to connect or congeal into anything real. She arranged the bags of groceries on the dining table distractedly while one of the policemen asked her question after question. She set aside the packet of bee hoon and otak, removing the rubber band around the oil-sodden food wrapper, unwrapping the folds. The bee hoon was still warm.

Later, Li Ann had asked what happened, as if she had not been listening when the police were explaining everything to both of them, as if she were missing some crucial part of the story, something her mother was withholding.

“What really happened?” Li Ann asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what really happened to Wee Song?”

“I don’t know.”

It had felt like the only—the most honest—answer to a question Mrs. Ho had barely understood. What had her daughter wanted to know? Did she not hear a single word from the mouth of the policeman, the Indian with a fixed, hard glare? Did she expect her mother to know everything, to see what wasn’t there, to explain, to account? Did she think she was holding back something, a vital clue that would crack the mystery of his death? Mrs. Ho had wished for her daughter to be gone, to leave her alone. But she had stayed, and the torrent of questions kept coming, unending.

“How would I know?” Mrs. Ho said again and again.

She had opened the door to Wee Song’s room and motioned to the police to enter. They moved around the place like a couple inspecting a new flat, looking for faults, scrupulous. She stood just outside the room, observing; she saw the mug on the study table and noticed that the laptop was still on. The room was at least tidy, she thought, everything in its place. The textbooks and paperbacks on the wall shelves, the schoolbag tucked under the table, the bed unruffled—unslept in? She ought to clear the mesh-wire paper bin, half-filled with crushed papers and tissues, but she let the police touch everything that belonged to her son and didn’t say a word. They opened drawers, checked between the book pages, and rifled through the paper bin.

Sometime later—when exactly?—she came into Wee Song’s bedroom and stared at an empty spot on his study table for a long time. And then it struck her: the laptop. Where did it go, when did it disappear? She must have allowed someone to take it away, even when she was present and watching. She had not blinked or looked away, but still, it had disappeared.

Now and then, standing in front of Wee Song’s wall niche at the temple, she would carry on the conversation with him in her head. Nothing important, small episodes from Wee Song’s life. Pleasant, harmless memories, usually from his childhood, a happy phase, in which she had a greater stake, a better hold. Those years, she was always with the boy, watching, hovering, protecting.

She enjoyed these conversations, her mind filling up the gaps. Her son’s voice, she heard it still, clear and pristine, at peace. In the quiet space of the memorial hall, her words sometimes tumbled out of her mouth, like scattered trails of dream talk. Not unusual here; she had seen other people do the same, airing out their thoughts, speaking their minds, their voices shaky or angry or needy. Once, she had seen an old woman beating her fist on a wall niche, her face lit with open rage, wailing.

In one of her daydreams, she had stayed at home that morning and knocked on Wee Song’s door, waiting for him to open it. She kept knocking and knocking, and she could hear him moving behind the door. She could sense his presence growing, the sound of his irritated voice getting loud, coming, coming, and she was impatient for the door to be flung open, the knuckles of her hands turning red, burning. He was right there, she knew, she could feel him just behind the door, his heavy presence, he was waiting—for what? Then she heard his laughter. Why was he laughing? Was this a joke to him? Did he find any of this funny?

Mrs. Ho hadn’t taken this or any of her daydreams seriously. What was it that woman, the counselor, had said? It was her—her mind— coping with the grief, with the loss, trying to regain control by negotiation, by bargaining. What a load of rot, total rubbish.

“Why would Pa need so much food? What’s the point?”

“They’re just offerings.”

Wee Song had accompanied her to the temple on the first anniversary of her husband’s death. She brought along a whole steamed chicken, a long slab of roast pork, lotus-paste buns, a mixed bag of fruits—apples, oranges, pears. Her husband had collapsed in a park while out on a jog, a heart attack. A relatively painless death, the doctor assured. Wee Song was thirteen then, had just started secondary school.

“What do we do with all this after we’re done with it? Throw it out?”

“We can leave the food on the tables outside the memorial hall, or we can take it back. Anything you want to eat, I can keep later?”

“No lah, I don’t want anything. Just leave it here.”

Wee Song was the one who had found the wall niche after they had searched high and low in the huge memorial hall a few times. He stayed by her side while she was busy wiping down the surface of the niche, but when she began to pray, he walked away, to look around the hall, wall after wall of photos and dates and inscriptions.

“That one over there, he’s only fifteen when he died. I counted.”

“Choy! Don’t say this kind of thing here.”

“It’s true, so young.”

“People die at any age. Go, go, don’t stay in here, wait for me outside.”

But Wee Song continued to walk around, studying the inscriptions intently. He seemed to be coping well, having reverted to his usual self after a brief period of moodiness and adjustment following his father’s sudden death. They were not close, father and son, but then again, neither were Wee Meng and his father. He was strict on the boys, sometimes unnecessarily so.

When she was done praying, she went in search of Wee Song. She found him in an alcove near the main altar, looking at a niche. A black-and-white photo of a woman, thin brows, a petulant look on her round, drab face. She threw a glance at the dates, calculated the age, and clicked her tongue. Wee Song was working through the columns of Chinese words on the inscription, a language he was never good at, the subject he nearly failed the year before, for his primary school leaving exams. That boy, he can hardly understand a word of Chinese, can’t even speak it properly, how’s he going to talk to us, her husband had often nagged.

You understand him well enough now, don’t you? The boy’s learning; he’s trying, she had said, pacifying.

“Ma, what does it say here?”

She looked at where he was pointing and brushed off his finger.

“Don’t point, I can see.”

She read the words but didn’t translate them for her son.

“What?”

“Nothing important, nothing you need to know.”

What does death, or the promise of a good afterlife—the words on a stranger’s inscription—mean to someone so young? Wee Song didn’t need to know any of it, not at his age.

She turned swiftly on her heel and led the way out of the hall, checking once to make sure Wee Song was following her.

When he was ten, Wee Song had a habit of telling her his dreams. He had excellent recall, an ability to remember small and specific details. He took his time with the words, his hands fluttering in front of his face, as if he were clearing his way through the dense foliage of his dreamscape.

“The tree is a huge one, and it has many branches, and it goes all the way up into the sky. It has no leaves, but its branches are strong, like big arms stretching out on every side. I’m climbing it, one by one, not scared at all.”

Maybe he was Jack in the dream. She had read him the story countless times. She didn’t point this out to him. She loved to hear his voice, and she wanted him to talk more. His teachers each said the same thing: he’s a quiet boy. This would be good for him, getting him to talk, to tell her his dreams.

“Then at the top, I see the clouds, so white, everywhere. I pop my head through them, and I see the sky.”

“What did you see in the sky?” She pulled the boy closer to the nook of her body, his warmth seeping into her. She anticipated what he would say next: a castle, the giant.

“I see a bird in the sky. It’s tiny, and it’s flying to me. There is a stone in its mouth. A bright stone, and it’s burning. I don’t want to touch it. But the bird keeps flying around me, above my head. It wants to drop that burning stone on me. But I don’t want it.”

Was this a story she had missed, perhaps something he had read on his own? She thought about the storybooks she had read to him, myths and fairy tales, mysteries and adventures, and knew the kinds the boy loved: a minor hardship, a quick resolution, a happy ending. But this story he was telling her now—where had it come from? It couldn’t have been his dream.

“Then I start to run. Yes, Mama, I can run on the clouds, so soft, so fluffy. But the bird is still flying above me, chasing me. And then it drops the burning stone on me. It hits my head, and I can’t see anything after that.”

Cloud, bird, stone. He was making this up as he went along, she thought, and smiled and put her nose into the boy’s hair. She would hear him out, she would get to the end of his dream, his made-up story.

“Then what did you do?” she asked.

“I continue to run; I want to run away from the birds.”

“Birds?”

“Yes, I can hear them, so many of them.”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. But they come so close to me with their burning stones. I can feel their feathers, like a hot blanket around me. And then I stop.”

“Why?”

“I can’t move anymore, so I stop.”

“Why?”

“I just stop.”

Wee Meng picked up the laptop from the police station a week after the cremation. He put it on the table in the living room, still in a large transparent bag. It sat there for three days, untouched, before Mrs. Ho took it into Wee Song’s room and left it on the study table. She had already cleared out the other things from the table, putting them into boxes. She removed the laptop cautiously from the bag, as if it were a gift whose value she didn’t know. She didn’t open the cover or switch it on; she wasn’t sure how to go about doing that. This thin silver thing, barely a folder thick, so fragile, so forbidding. With a wet tissue, she wiped it down from top to underside.

During dinner with Wee Meng, she brought up the laptop. There was no need to keep it around, she told him; either Wee Meng took it or they could throw it out.

“Do you want it?”

“I have my own laptop; I don’t need an extra one.”

“Then I’ll throw it out.”

“No, no, I can sell it off.”

“Don’t sell, later other people see—” she motioned in the direction of Wee Song’s room, not really sure what was inside the laptop she didn’t want others to see—“and anyhow use it.”

“I can format the hard disk lah, delete everything first.”

“Delete?”

“Erase everything inside. So there’s nothing left.”

“Why?”

“Then it’ll be as good as new.”

“No, don’t do that.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“Can’t you use it?”

“Ma, I already told you, I don’t need it.”

Mrs. Ho suddenly regretted bringing it up. She wasn’t sure any decision she or her children made would be the right one at the moment. She didn’t want to regret anything later on. There were already too many losses, each exerting an invisible weight on her so that she couldn’t imagine herself bearing anything more.

Seeing the look on her face, Wee Meng backtracked and said: “I can hold on to it first. Anyway, mine always gives me problems now; maybe I can use it when it dies on me later.”

Then, realizing his faux pas, Wee Meng quickly apologized.

“Never mind,” Mrs. Ho said. The matter was settled. She didn’t want to give it another thought.

Mrs. Ho sometimes wondered about the nature of her grief at her son’s death, unlike her husband’s, which was intense but fleeting. A brief season in the doldrums that passed in time. She had had the children to think about then, for one; she didn’t want her mood to affect theirs, she told herself, she needed to be strong for them, for her own sake. That was the easiest front to present. She didn’t need to face up to the more difficult explanation, that she had not felt anything for her husband for a long time. They were considerate and solicitous toward each other, but there hadn’t been much in their relationship for years. They had drifted along, separately, indifferently. His death was a mercy, once the dark cloud of bereavement finally lifted. Not that she would admit it.

When Mrs. Wang told her about the imaginary fights she still had with her dead husband, Mrs. Ho had found her confessions indecent, even absurd. Why would she want to fight with her late husband? They had had enough disagreements when he was alive, and she didn’t want any now. The dead could keep their grievances, their bitterness; she would retain the small pocket of amorous, benign memories she had of her husband, especially from the early years of their thirty-nine together. The conversations she had with him now were always warm, conciliatory.

Her son’s death was entirely different. It took a huge chunk out of her, and continued, even now, to leave its mark. A casual thought of him would slip in while she was cooking or folding the laundry, and a sharp, sudden pain would ignite, as if she were being crushed, her head pulped by a steel bar. In one moment, she would recall Wee Song as a baby, lying in the incubator, breathing through the tube, and then in the next, his stony powdered face in the casket, his eyes glued shut, his lips sealed. She would put up a resistance, fight to push these images out of her mind. They weren’t like what she imagined during her conversations on the bus rides or at the temple; those she could summon at will, control. Unlike the birds in Wee Song’s dream, with their burning stones and huge flapping wings, these random fragments, wild and unmanageable, were like dark ugly crows pecking at her brain.

She had had to learn to deal with these sudden visitations—which was what she called them, these untimely disruptions. The conversations had lessened the frequency of the visitations, softened their impact. She needed to work at them constantly, dutifully, a necessary task. The sorrow she felt, long and dark and flowing, wouldn’t always be the same, surely, would loosen its grip over time? This was the thought that calmed her, the knowledge that what she felt wasn’t permanent.

She loved her son, she always would. But she couldn’t forget his reckless act. It was thoughtless, stupid. He was a stupid, stupid boy. That boy is going to suffer because of what you’re doing now. She couldn’t forgive what he had done. She wouldn’t. She would hold it inside her and let it grow, stretching long branches, unleashing deep roots, reaching up and wide, filling every aching, longing space. It would be a dark, wondrous thing, alive, always alive, inside her, twining her to her dead son.

He would be safe this time, inside her, inside the hard, empty space she had created for him, where she would keep him safe, monitored, loved. She would always be a mother, his mother.

The boy had sneaked up to her side when she had her eyes closed in prayer, immersed in a conversation with Wee Song. Mrs. Ho felt something brush against her, and turned to stare at a face looking up at her in stern watchfulness.

“Why are you talking to yourself?” the boy asked in English. Large alert eyes, long spider-leg lashes, hair parted neatly to the left. Eight or nine years old perhaps. Mrs. Ho looked around her, hoping to draw the attention of the child’s parents. It was midweek, a Wednesday; shouldn’t the kid be in school? Was it the school holidays again? No one met her eyes, except the boy, who spoke again: “Who are you talking to?”

Mrs. Ho tried to ignore the child, but the spell was broken. She couldn’t get back to where she was in the conversation. The child’s presence was a distraction, a nuisance.

“I’m talking to my son,” Mrs. Ho said, in a hot burst of Mandarin. If the child couldn’t understand a word she was saying, then it was for the better. He could just leave. She didn’t want to have to talk to him in English, which was not something she was adept at. Li Ann’s children were always spewing English at her, long streams of words from which she could only pick out a word or two, the rest a babble of squawks.

The boy tilted his body from left to right, in mock parody, as if trying to look around Mrs. Ho, a look of amusement creeping across his face.

“Where is he?”

When Mrs. Ho didn’t reply, he asked again: “Where?”

Mrs. Ho closed her eyes again and held them shut. She would wait for the boy to give up, to leave. But he continued to stay by her side.

“Is that him?”

She glared down at the boy, who was pointing at the wall niche in front of her.

“Is he in there?”

“Go back to your parents.” Again, her reply, in Mandarin.

“My daddy said I can stay here if I behave.”

“Go, don’t stay here,” Mrs. Ho said, dropping her voice to a menacing pitch.

The boy hardened his stare and stood his ground. Mrs. Ho could smell the sweat off the boy’s T-shirt, a cutting, sour stench. An old couple, two rows down, were throwing reproachful glances at them.

Mrs. Ho crouched down and drilled her eyes into the boy’s. She stared long and hard into them, and for a moment she couldn’t decide what she wanted to say. Then she remembered.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to visit my amah. She’s dead.”

“Where?”

“There, behind there.”

Mrs. Ho glanced at where the boy was gesturing, to their right, down the aisle. She couldn’t tell which of those milling in front of the wall niches was the child’s father. She turned back to the boy and gave him a disapproving look. Then she picked up the bags of offerings on the floor beside her and, after breathing a quiet goodbye to Wee Song, began to take her leave.

“I don’t like you.” The boy again, his voice piping up. “You’re not a nice lady.”

Mrs. Ho stopped to adjust the weight of the offerings in her right hand, shifting a bag to her left hand. It felt better now, the weight distributed, the pain in her right hand easing just a bit. She stood for a while looking at the boy, then at the wall niche behind him, before sweeping her gaze across the huge hall, the rows of red candles and overflowing urns of burning joss sticks on the large wooden altar. She was about to say something when the boy made a ghastly face, hissed at her, and dashed down one of the aisles, his footfall and laughter resounding off the walls and up into the darkened rafters of the memorial hall.

Mrs. Ho couldn’t quite catch the words the boy was shouting as he ran off. Something in English. Something he had hoped would get a rise out of her. A playful, naughty word.

When the sounds finally died off, she turned on her heel and walked out of the hall, making her way to the designated place in the temple where she could lay out the spread of offerings, of roast meats and fruit and sweet buns and canned drinks, for her dead husband, and for her dead son.

Read more from Issue 18.1.