Yan Jing
Issue 2: Vanishing, January 2024
COVID lockdown restrictions have just loosened. My parents and I begin to go on walks in secluded parks, doing our best to avoid large crowds. On this particular day, the sky is a dusky, lampshaded orange, and we’re on an empty back path somewhere in Hort Park I can’t quite remember. Off the path, there’s a garden with little plots for different plants and owners, and in the middle, my mother spots a small greenhouse constructed out of translucent plastic stretched tight over a metal frame, the plastic fogged over and blurry. Crying out in childlike excitement, she does a cartoonish speed-walk over to the tent, her soles loudly scuffing on the path. She cups her hands over her eyes and presses her face to the plastic, peering inside curiously, as I cringe with secondhand embarrassment and look around to see if anyone is watching–but there’s no one, still.
She turns and heads back to the path. It looks like watermelons are growing in there, she says, as we walk on. I ignore her at first, but she continues. This reminds me of when I moved out of my kampung. I was a young girl then, and afterwards, I would have these weird dreams. I would go back to the kampung, but it would be overrun with all these watermelon vines, just growing all over the ground, the path, the houses, everything.
I turn to her. Did your family grow watermelons there?
That’s the thing, she says. We never did. But the memory of it is so vivid, that I don’t know if it was a dream, or real life.
*
My mother remembers her childhood in fragments only, which I glean from her when they surface by chance. When the rambutan tree downstairs bears fruit, she tells me how she and her cousins would climb the trees that grew on the slope behind her house in the kampung to pluck ripe rambutan to eat.
When she spots a durian tree, she describes the crashing sound that falling durians would make on their zinc roof when there was a storm. When she brings over a bowl of Teuh Det Gang (⿊⾖羹 / Black Bean Slurry, a Hakka dessert) that my grandmother made, she tells me about how housewives would gather and chatter in the shade under the trees when it was hot while stirring a big cauldron of the sticky dessert. I remember hating its texture when I was young, but at some point along the way I realised that I had learned to savour its rich, sticky taste, a faint sweetness balanced by the bitter fragrance of citrus peels.
I know that when she was nine, my grandparents were informed that their land was being claimed by the state for redevelopment. Her family moved into the two-room HDB flat where my grandmother still lives today. She tells me less about her childhood after that, but I know that the flat was like a cage for her. In this new urban environment that felt alien and strange, my grandparents forbade their children from leaving the at without them. Every day, after she returned from school, or worse, over the school holidays, while her parents were off busy working, my mother would find herself trapped in the small flat with nowhere to go. She speaks of those years as being unbearably lonely, boring, and sad.
When she daydreams out loud about her future, my mother most often wishes for a garden. A big, peaceful garden, with lots of green and fresh air, where I can grow my own fruits. That’s how she describes it. Sometimes this dream of hers reminds me of another childhood recollection of hers, of when she was too young to go to school still, and my grandmother would take her along on one of her several jobs, to clean rich people’s houses. She told me about how my grandmother left her to wait before French double doors that opened into a beautiful, sprawling garden, and how she sat there, entranced by the peaceful vista laid out in front of her. How that vision comes back to her still, with a yearning for a place like that to call her own. Sometimes when I’m feeling unkind I tell her that it’s wishful thinking. There’s no chance of her getting that in Singapore (not in this property market), and although my mother often fantasises about migrating, I’m skeptical that she’ll be happier anywhere else. Where do you think you can run away to? I ask her. Things are bad everywhere. She considers this, a little deflated. Yeah, you’re right. 这世界上没有乌托邦 (In this world, there is no utopia).
Another kampung memory my mother recounts to me from time to time is of her brothers mixing crushed glass into hot molten glue and dipping lengths of string in it, then stretching the string out between trees to dry. They would carefully wind the string up, tie it to their kites, and then take the kites flying. As their glass-laced kite string sliced through those of other children, they would laugh in glee. Those other children would only be able to watch as their kites disappeared, snatched away into the wind.
*
When she was expecting her third child (me), my mother decided to quit her job to focus on raising her kids, and my parents moved into a new high-rise condo that faced Little Guilin, a former granite quarry that was turned into a park after it fell into disuse and was filled by rainwater in the 80s, tackily named after the far-flung granite wonders of Guilin, China. In the times since we moved away, whenever I’ve returned, I’ve been struck by the sheer, surreal absurdity of the sight: in the middle of the quiet residential estates of Bukit Gombak, just opposite HDB flats, condos, beyond the edge of the stadium, the road takes a bend and suddenly there it is: the looming granite cliff of Bukit Gombak Hill, towering above a green, murky pond, stuck somewhere between inarticulable majesty and touristy pastiche.
Growing up, I felt with an articulable certainty that the hill was an ancient, living being. You could build a low wall around the pond, pave a stone slab path around it, and plaster an idyllic name on the park, but it remained, brimming with a veiled life force that we would get a small glimpse of every so often. During the monsoon seasons, we always knew it was about to storm because the hill would send us an exodus of flying termites before a single drop of rain had even begun to fall. We would shut all our windows but they would find their way in anyway, worming and squeezing their bodies through the tiny cracks and the edges, until our house was swarmed by a seething horde. When it got bad, we would switch off all the lights in our house, save one, and leave a bucket of water underneath. Sitting in the darkness, we would wait and listen to the whisper of their wings as they swarmed around and smacked into the lone bulb, covering it almost entirely with their writhing mass, until eventually their wings fell off and they tumbled into the bucket. Then, we would spend the day after sweeping up the slim glitter of countless insect wings strewn across the floors and stuck in the corners.
I could not be shaken in my conviction that the hill was living. As I stared at the hill day after day, year after year, its craggled face of rock seemed to slowly morph before my eyes: some stripes of white becoming more pronounced, other striations slowly sinking into darker veins. After heavy storms, as the entire hill was still shrouded in wispy mist, we would often hear a deep, moaning rumble as parts of the rock face would hew off and plummet, sinking deep into the pond, which would be dyed a bloodied, pasty orange for the next few days. I began to see features, find wizened old faces and trace strange, snarling creatures entombed in the surface of the rock. During the brief period when Mas Selamat had escaped from prison and his face was plastered across signs and newspapers, my siblings and I began to whisper in conspiratorial tones to each other that he was perhaps hiding somewhere on that hill, alongside an imaginary menagerie of murderers and beasts in the heart of the hill’s wilderness. For years, I would swear on my life that I had once seen a faint silhouette walking beyond the edges of the
park that lined the quarry, walking up the rocky slope that led to the forest, and disappearing deep within, but then time passed, we moved, and I stopped thinking about it. Now, that image is faint in my mind, in an indistinguishable realm between memory and fiction.
There is much I have forgotten about those years there. We moved away over a decade ago now, hoping that we could leave behind many memories that we did not want to keep. But some things lingered; others returned to me gently, after many years, things that were not so much forgotten as left to lie in waiting for the day they would eventually resurface as if they had never left. One that returned to me recently, seemingly out of nowhere: for some years, my mother would often take me caterpillar-hunting at the copse of willowtrees growing under some nearby flats. As I squirmed in fear, she would pluck off willow leaves where they munched away and show them to me victoriously: Jing, look! Look! She brought them home with more leaves and kept them in an empty plastic fish tank with a cheery pink lid. When they eventually metamorphosed, she would call me over with a cry of excitement. We would watch the fresh butterfly unfurl and beat its wings hesitantly, slowly, like a child blinking away sleep. Then when it began to fly in earnest, batting itself against the plastic walls, my mother would bring the tank to the balcony and open its lid with a fling, hurling the fluttering butterfly to the
wind. It felt as if we were returning something that we had borrowed. As we stood on the balcony, I would always watch as that blur of colour drifted and danced away toward the hill, silently determined that if I just focused hard enough, if I pushed my senses to their limit, I would be able to witness the exact moment that the butterfly melded into a patch of green, or disappeared into a crest of shadow, merging into the being that was the hill. And yet, every single time, no matter how hard I tried, there would come a moment when I realised that the spot I had thought was the butterfly was in fact a tiny outcropping of rock or a blush of trees somewhere in the hill’s face, when the dancing trail of the butterfly melted into a speck so small that I could no longer follow its path.
*
Funnily enough after we left Little Guilin we ended up moving back to the same area that my mother grew up in. My grandmother’s flat is just a short drive away, or, if the weather is nice enough, a long walk down the longkang just outside. For a while I hated walking by the longkang; at night it always stank of shit, and the water inside always ran a sludgy brown, often mixed with some mysterious iridescent oil slick, or frothy swirling bubbles. When there was a downpour the usually empty gully of the canal would suddenly be a surging channel of water the colour of something between Milo and blood. I often wondered what would happen if the rain never stopped, and the water burst the brims of the canal, spilling out over the walkways that flanked it until they were submerged, rising even further until it crept into our residential estate, lapping past the wheels of cars and over the tops of short bushes until the ground would be nowhere to be seen.
With its gushing tides of filthy, muddy water, the longkang also brought currents of life. Walking along it to and fro the nearby MRT I would often be startled by the ash of white as a heron or egret soared by; a kingfisher would flit from a railing to a tree branch; a koel, somewhere, would let loose its forlorn howl. Monitor lizards crept silently upstream; once, a family of otters surged through and ravaged fishes in the shallow water, snatching them up and decapitating them just for the fun of it, tossing uneaten bodies aside after one swift bite. Then they crawled up the side of the canal and frolicked in the grass patch by the walkway briefly before they disappeared deeper into the forest beyond, gone as quickly as they had arrived.
Over the years, the longkang too began to shift. The gravel walkway on one side of it, the uneven, narrow, cracked path on the other were all paved over and widened. Shelters were built along the walkways to make it easier for commuters heading between their residences and the MRT. The burning glow of the tungsten lamps were switched out for a more amenable fluorescent. Eventually the stretch of primary forest that ran alongside it was slated for clearing and residential development. After much public backlash the government agreed to only clear half of it, for the time being. I used to stare into the foliage and daydream of the world that would await me if I walked off the path into the forest and never stopped; where I would emerge on the other side. Now the foliage is surrounded by erected construction barriers, the corrugated metal sheets stamped with a bloody multilingual sign that reads Danger Keep Out, with the tips of cranes and excavators peeking out from above. Since then monkeys have started to appear at the longkang; walking across the railings of the bridges that span over the canal, peering at the people who point cameras at them. Perhaps they know it’s time for them to move; I wonder where the longkang will take them.
The land where my mother’s kampung once was is nearby, too. We don’t often go there, but it’s a short drive away, or accessible via the old railway tracks if you know which way to go. The winding Old Holland Road that leads there is rumoured to be haunted because it was built over the Hakka cemetery that used to be there. To this day, almost half a century since the Hakka village was resettled, most of the land somehow remains empty and undeveloped. As Old Holland Road emerges from a forest it winds around a massive, beautiful open field, where I occasionally go walking in the evening. The sky feels so open there; looking into the distance in the right direction you see only trees (although, inevitably, in the peripheries of your vision, a building in the far distance peeks out). Somewhere, there, my mother grew up. The only trace of her childhood is the former ancestral hall, which doubled as her primary school, which has since been converted into the Fong Yun Thai Association Columbarium (丰永⼤公会 三⾢祠) to house the remains exhumed from the cemetery when the land was bought by the government. In the past decade, the columbarium has shrunk, its land slowly carved away to make way for private property developments that have risen around the perimeter of the eld. With the properties built there, it has since become more populated; people go there to walk their dogs, fly kites and drones, and once I even saw a BMX bike course crudely constructed from corrugated metal sheets and lumpy earthen ramps.
Once, it was the middle of the afternoon and the field was mostly empty, the sun still too blazing hot for most. I was back in Singapore after many months away, catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. Halfway across the field, I saw the tiny speck of a small dog running unleashed, its owner following not far behind. I sensed movement in the edges of my vision and looked up and saw a black shape in the sky and pointed it out to my friend. It looked bigger than your average bird; and it glided through the air without flapping its wings, its gracefully elegant winged silhouette looking deceptively still as it rode invisible currents through the sky. I think it’s a raptor, I said. Maybe a hawk, or eagle, or kite or something.
As I spoke I realised that it was making a graceful looping arc through the air, a concentric spiral of motion that slowly curved tighter and tighter, possessed by some unseen centripetal force. It’s circling, I realised. It’s hunting something.
It seemed so unbelievable that it took my friend and I a few seconds before it dawned on us in horror and disbelief that the raptor was targeting the dog in
the field. We had never seen a wild bird of prey in Singapore attack, let alone a domesticated lapdog. We stared on, frozen–we were too far away to run over there and do anything about it, and even if we shouted we would be barely audible. The dog scampered on obliviously. The blur in the sky paused, tipped upward slightly and began to plummet earthward. Its shape shifted mid-fall, wings peeling back, that wide open span narrowing and sharpening into a point as it gained speed. There was no sense of malice or evil intention in that motion; it was a graceful, beautiful thing, inevitable, natural, and terrifying. Then, at the last second, its fall broke, and it swerved up and away. The dog’s owner was sprinting toward it, shouting and waving his arms. He must have scared it off. From where we were we could only faintly hear him. The dog seemed to have finally realised something was wrong; it paused and looked a little uncertain, and ran over to its owner, who was craning his neck at the sky. Then they both continued on their way, a little quicker than before, the owner keeping the dog close by his side.
My friend and I looked up in the empty, colourless sky, searching and searching, but whatever had been there before was already nowhere to be found.
Yan Jing likes to write about literature and the arts as a way for people to navigate identity and belonging. His own personal work focuses on memory and distance, some of which can be found @blinkingjing on Instagram.
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