Warwick



刺客A NOTE ON LANGUAGEThis piece uses English, Mandarin, and Singlish, a combination somewhat unique to the Singaporean Chinese. Translations are offered where such movement is interesting, or valuable to the texture of the narrative and its sound. If many Western or European languages can show up in print, assured and without translation, speakers of other languages are under no obligation to offer clarity, much less perfect clarity (which does not exist). Or at least that is the (hypo)thesis at work here. By oscillating between these three buzzing bodies (languages), I hope to surface a vision of the Singaporean Chinese linguistic plane.It is of note also that Chinese is the majority race in Singapore. I speak earnestly for my place in the global periphery, but it is worth keeping in mind that I also occupy a centre, and a highly privileged one, at that.PROLOGUE (SONG)wonderkindhave you heard the song my mother singswell it sounds like thisit sounds like thislyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not the farmer you imagine I amlyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not the dirty-faced factory manI’ve decided I won’t have childrenunless I can teach them all my wordsthe ones I’ve snapped, invented, correctedused so much they hurtour mouths in bracesour tongues wilted like flowerswords have no powermy wretched voice sliced opento let the air invagabondhave you heard the song my mother singswell it sounds like thisit sounds like thislyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not the prodigy you think I amlyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not a morose migrant manblue eyed innocencehave you heard the song my mother singswell it sounds like thiswill you sing it pleaselyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not the animal you fear I amI am not the last-standing yellow mantall men slaughter with butter knivesI’ll strangle you with syllablesthat go on without end, without breathingwe might suffocate togetherlyrics are cheaplanguage is weakI cry in a language I cannot understandI am not the animal you fear I amI am not the last-standing yellow manI am not the animal you fear I amI am not the last-standing yellow man1It’s our first international job, which means that Timo’s Craigslist ads and Reddit threads must have worked. This time, I am acting alone, and the target is in Taiwan. Ye Li is my backup, even though I’ve said I don’t need one. She’ll trail me throughout, with enough lag to keep up without getting too close. I don’t like being followed, but some of us have died on the job, and that’s not the sort of end I have in mind for me.I sleep four hours. My flight is at six AM. The toilet near the boarding gate stinks, but I wait inside for a while, scribbling words in thick marker on the cubicle walls. Profanities first: fuck, stupid, shit, motherfucker, asshole. Then names, baby names for all the women who might pass through this same smelly toilet: Sarah, Junita, Jia Yi, Indra, Iffah, Georgia, Molly, Ke Xin, Eve, Atiqah, Kasthuri. Finally I write: 刺客, which means assassin in Mandarin. I am not an assassin. I realize all the names I’ve written are female ones, as though women only need names for girl babies. To be honest though, I don’t care for boy babies. They can name those themselves. There is no shortage of words for men.The lot of us work under this man called Timo, who smokes three packs of Camels a day. (The last time I tasted a Camel I nearly coughed out my left lung.) Timo is Malaysian. On his first visit to Singapore by car, a local Mercedes drove off after bumping into the back of Timo’s Volkswagen, leaving a phone-wielding Timo who, armed with photographs of the Mercedes, set out to find someone who would avenge him for a hundred dollars. Which is how he discovered the gap in the service industry when it came to trained, professional hitmen. I was working in a 7-Eleven then, the happy graveyard shift sacrifice of the Hougang Street 21 outlet five days a week. My shifts began at ten and ended at six in the morning, which meant I couldn’t claim cover for a taxi home. But my hourly rate was a smidge higher than the daytime employees, my customers were mostly bleary-eyed and unchatty, and I never had another body pressed up against mine on the MRT. Everyone else was always headed in the opposite direction. I would have stayed in that job if I hadn’t seen Timo’s notice. It had been brusquely stuck to the traffic light, just above the button:PROFESSIONAL WORK, SHORT HOURS3K STARTING PAY W/ YEARLY BONUSMUST BE FLEXIBLE AND WORK WEEKENDS25 YRS OLD AND ABOVEMEN PREFERRED854323128543231285432312854323128543231285432312I don’t like phone calls, so I WhatsApped Timo.> hi, I saw ur notice abt the job. can I get more info? what's it abt?> Hello, wats ur name> cui ying> Girl ah> yeah, cannot?> Men btr 4 dis > can I get more info> Can call?> okayHe didn’t say hi. “I know the job sounds damn dodgy lah, but it’s legit. Like the pay is no joke.”“So what’s the job scope exactly?”“Have you watched, uh…Mission Impossible? Or 无间道?”“Yeah.”“It’s like that. But not so bad lah. Not so dangerous.”I liked his oddly gentle voice. It set me at ease as he ran over the details: yes, got insurance cover; yes, got training; no, no guns; yah, sure, maybe a woman like me is okay for the job; the whole team is about ten people, mostly Singaporeans. No Malaysian of Timo’s age is named Timo at birth. (It’s not short for Timothy, either.) Timo was Wen Jie first, born poor in Ipoh. Not your prodigious slumdog millionaire or rags-to-riches proof of meritocracy. Timo’s just Timo. You want to get that right. Sure, he went through primary school and high school, job hopped, paid rent, and eventually hired a bunch of low-life Singaporeans to work for him. But if you see some upward moving curve, a trajectory – there isn’t one. There are just dots on a page. It’s an AirAsia flight. The food and passengers are tolerable for the cheap ticket, and our group’s only a couple years old so money’s tight if we still want yearly bonuses. When things pick up I’m going to ask Timo for a raise and proper holidays. This job is pretty killer on my health, and I gotta save up too. People dream of Wikipedia legacies, houses in nice cities, happy marriages and healthy children. My life goal is simply to stop working. 2Everything in its placeHaving arrived, or stayed, or gone awayLife thoroughly lived, sated, void of weightWithout loss or gainEverything in its placeThe shape of the body precisely pressedInto the space between tree rootsSuppose this was itNo more rampage to be hadIn this eternal NowWithout relief or a need for reliefWithout fear or courageWithout love or heartacheNeither sadness nor joySuppose this was itHer rest at the end of all things begins with fervent slumber. Each time she wakes she closes her eyes to sleep that bit more, until her body is stripped of its desire to sleep. Her body grows soft with disuse, plump with satiation, glowy with consciousness no longer marred by fatigue. It is fully awake. She no longer prays; she does not need to. She does not long for, or fear, or detest company. She is not lonely. No one calls her, not even scammers. Her bills are the same amount each month. She never feels hot or cold. Next to the sofa bed is installed a row of power sockets that power a mini fridge, a microwave, a portable induction hob, a table lamp and a kettle. A small set of plastic drawers from Japan Home hold other essentials like medication. Distilled water comes through a DIY plastic tube attached to the filter in her kitchen, which runs through her flat to the sofa bed, and which she turns on and off using a two-stringed contraption. Groceries are delivered every Monday to her door, which is the only time (other than trips to the toilet) she leaves the sofa bed. She watches every Netflix show, every Instagram story, every Facebook video. She reads all the chocolate chip cookie recipes (chewy and crunchy), every Straits Times article, every op-ed on Trump’s tweets. She plucks her armpit hairs with tweezers to the Spotify playlist of 2000s Chinese pop songs. Lala Hsu sings tenderly:又來到這個港口 沒有原因的拘留我的心乘著斑駁的輕舟尋找失落的沙洲The lost island, continent, oasis of sand. Although there is no difference in standard pronunciation, Taiwanese Mandarin remains steadfast in traditional characters, unlike the simplified ones of mainland China. She’s more familiar with the simplified script, the version taught in Singapore. She joins Lala for the chorus, her pronunciation, or 咬字 (lit. bite-word) a little off throughout. Despite studying it for over a decade, Mandarin has remained opaque to her. Unwilling to give.Her sofa bed is positioned between two windows, whose curtains are always half-drawn. She likes to watch the sunlight that spills in, trying to register its movement across the floor as the sun cuts across the sky. Sunrise begins at the window on the left; sunset ends at the window on the right. Which means that the sun is always hidden from her at its highest point in the sky. 3The AirAsia plane crash in 2015 took the sister of one of my friends. I try not to imagine it as the flight attendant hands me a cup of water: the seats tipping ninety degrees, the children eerily silent as the adults begin to wail, the religious praying, the elite indignant, the young taking their last Snapchats, the old relieved to finally know how they will die. Oxygen masks falling down, passenger’s cheeks turning paler than the body of the plane while those of the flight attendants flush with duty, a loud pop informing us that the wings are going up in flames…Since it’s a budget airline, the (mostly Singaporean) attendants willingly use Singlish with passengers, though over the PA system they revert to standard grammar, conscious of their “th”s and end consonants as they tell us we’re experiencing some turbulence so do return to your seats and keep your seatbelts fastened while the seatbelt sign is on. Despite these public charades, campaigns like the Speak Good English Movement can’t touch this instant intimacy or lack of pretence, this truthful, earthy ease. If English is Symphony 92.4 FM or the evening news, Singlish is pop music or a Channel 8 drama. A recurring dream as opposed to chosen heirloom. A secret sin or guilty pleasure. Our Freudian slips, the way we speak in private.One flight attendant feels particularly familiar. Singaporean Chinese woman, obviously well-educated, probably has a gym membership. Despite her neat bob and starched uniform, I can see her queuing for bubble tea, or ordering food in Mandarin at a hawker centre. (Someone like me would order in English. There’s no science to it. You can just tell.) Once, while waiting for the toilet, I manage to chat with her.“Customer service must be even harder mid-air,” I say. Her nametag reads “Julia Lee”.“It’s okay lah. Has its perks. You going on holiday?” “Short business trip.”“Wah, so young got business trip?”“I work in a start-up doing human resource stuff. Not a big business.”“Ah. Well, you know what I work as.” Julia stretches her arms wide in mock show-and-tell.“Didn’t mean to catch you on the job. Paiseh.” We laugh. “You look pretty young too.”“Yeah, this is my first job after grad.”“Can tell.”“Eh what do you mean? I thought I look quite mature leh. Got makeup some more.”“Bo pian. Got xiao mei mei face.”She laughs. “I’m gonna add you to my list of rude passengers.”“Add bah. Julia, right? I’m Cui Ying.”She catches me again when we’ve landed and the passengers are leaving the plane. “Nice talking to you. Maybe we’ll meet again, Cui Ying.”“It’s 2019. I’ll look for you on Facebook.”“Can.”I find her easily. Her profile picture is a selfie through one of those Meitu XiuXiu photo apps, her face soft, pale, and pink through the filter. She accepts my request before I’ve even made it past immigration.The man’s house is quick to find by cab. I spot him through a window, his hair pulled back with gel to reveal widow’s peaks. As promised in the brief there aren’t any cameras around, and the street is quiet. Once the taxi leaves, I knock on his door, stab him cleanly with my parang, and leave just as he begins yelling. Ye Li, whose flight arrived fifteen minutes after mine, meets me at the rendezvous point – a night market, where we eat roadside dim sum.Once back in Singapore I resume a regular slew of local jobs. These are handled without backup, because (1) we don’t have enough manpower lah, say many times already, (2) we always call for a GoJek or Uber in advance, so a getaway is easy. Timo always pays us a day early too, so the team’s kept pretty happy. (“I might be Malaysian, but my work ethic is Singaporean – kiasu and kiasi,” he says.) I’m voted employee of the month at our team dinner and receive some Kinokuniya vouchers. Shiok. 4Every trip from the sofa bed to the toilet or front door (for deliveries) feels new. She notices, for the first time, the lushness of the rain trees outside the hallway window. She leans out, looks down, and feels the thrill of tenth floor living. Some days the smell of oyster sauce wafts in. Some days curry leaves, or cigarette smoke. Because she’s listening, she hears muffled arguments, and piano-playing, and loudly and distantly sung songs. She hears the stray cats mating, and the neighbourhood teenagers swearing at one another. She hears the rain coming to a stop. Each time she returns to the sofa bed, all is silent, odourless, and tranquil again. The sun rises at the left window and sets at the right one. Rest overtakes her, and other movements are forgotten. The key flaw of her work had been that it never paused or came to some natural end. After the office every weekday she supervised the homework of her children, and cooked dinner for the family. She did the laundry every three days, worked overtime twice a month, visited the wet market on Mondays, and brought her children to music lessons on Saturdays. Her husband worked six days a week and slept in on Sunday while the children watched TV and his wife pored over their accounts. Her husband had not been a lazy man, but she had been a most hardworking woman. One day she made it all come to an end, which it did. Which allowed her to deposit herself in this flat, on this sofa bed, with everything she needed, without stale regret or fresh desire. She would end her life a lazy woman, useless and unyielding. Unmovable object of her own making. The voice recorder shows up a month or two later. Or rather, that’s when she sees it, resting calmly in the lowest shelf of her husband’s old bookcase. She’d rarely looked at his things while he still lived here, so it must have been mere chance that she saw the compact metal device with its small, dull, green screen facing up. The charger is just further in the same shelf. She watches Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern while it charges. Just in case, she puts on English subtitles. At the end of the film, as Songlian is revealed wandering the compound, traumatized and insane, the voice recorder beeps. She unplugs it. It is warm with power. He didn’t remove the memory card. There are twelve recordings on it, all scattered through 2016, ending with one on 1 January 2017. New Year’s. Where to begin? She scrolls through them again, and starts with the longest one – sixteen minutes and twenty three seconds.He’s reading Mandarin poetry.“国破山河在，城春草木深。感时花溅泪，恨别鸟惊心。烽火连三月，家书抵万金。白头搔更短，浑欲不胜簪。”“故人西辞黄鹤楼，烟花三月下扬州。孤帆远影碧空尽，唯见长江天际流。”At moments he pauses, and she hears him drink water, or flip a page. He’s working through what she guesses is a curation of personal favourites. She can see the crinkle of his brows as he focuses, his wire-rimmed glasses stained with fingerprints. In the middle of the recording is a long pause, maybe twenty seconds long, of complete silence. She turns the volume up all the way. Nothing. And suddenly he begins again, as though no time has passed at all.“凉风起天末，君子意如何。鸿雁几时到，江湖秋水多。文章憎命达，魑魅喜人过。应共冤魂语，投诗赠汨罗。”She doesn’t understand a word. Unlike the contemporary Chinese she was taught in school, these old poems her husband chose are in classical Chinese. Still, she likes the low timbre of voice as he emotes earnestly, his lilting Chongqing accent seeping through. Maybe she misses it a little bit.They’d met while both working as part-time receptionists at a tuition centre called HIGH STAR (in all caps, always, the centre director had told them). There’d been a full-time receptionist who worked weekdays, while the two of them handled ten-hour shifts on weekends as a duo. She’d been a fresh junior college graduate while he’d just begun his final year of secondary school. He was her age, but because he’d only moved to Singapore when he was fifteen, his English ability didn’t qualify him for the same grade level. There were many others like him, scholars from China who came alone and studied as though their lives depended on their grades, because they did. In order to retain their scholarships, they had to prove constantly that they were deserving of it. To make their long distance sacrifices count, they had to excel. The tuition centre had been located in a shopping mall. A few times prior to their shift she’d seen him at the food court with a cup of tea, scribbling quickly into an assessment book. She never went over to say hi. It seemed too intrusive; he felt too desperate, too naked.She took charge of most conversations and phone calls, while he printed worksheets, filed attendance sheets, and logged data into Excel. He would swoop in to save her only when someone who only spoke Mandarin showed up, and in those moments she watched and listened to him carefully. He rarely spoke at work otherwise, preferring to nod in greeting and farewell, without saying anything in between. Whenever he did speak in English, mostly when a tutor or parent tried to strike up a conversation, his cheeks flushed harshly. Noticing this, she’d tried speaking to him in Mandarin, only to find herself burning the same shade of red. His awkward English had made her feel safe with him, just as, she suspected, her lousy Mandarin had made him feel safe with her. He continues speaking through the voice recorder. She lays down on the sofa bed and places the device by her ear:“空山新雨后，天气晚来秋。明月松间照，清泉石上流。竹喧归浣女，莲动下渔舟。随意春芳歇，王孙自可留。”She hears the words as pure sound. The consistent meter carries her through to each end rhyme, while his voice illuminates an internal melody, an inherent song almost too small to be heard. She thinks of the high frequency sounds picked up by dogs.Without warning, another voice cuts in, not in Mandarin.“Eh, dinner you want eat what?” It’s her, in Singlish, yelling from the kitchen. Her question is thunderous after his expressive recitation, his朗诵. He sighs. The recording stops. 5徐萃颖 xú cuì y?ngThis is my name. Xu is my family name, Cui Ying my given name. There’s no middle name, it’s just Cui Ying. My first name, like most Chinese names, is pretty ambitious lah. The ‘cui’ I was given means assemble, or gather. With the grass radical艹 comes an image of densely grown grass. The ‘ying’ of my name means gifted, outstanding. Wikipedia explains these things pretty well, if you want more explanation. It has a solid narrative arc too – the scatter plot of social media, portfolios, and CVs.It had thrown me off when Timo first called me Ying Ying. Ji bai. Gave me goosebumps. Ying Ying is the sort of nickname a close female friend might give me. Timo, despite his gentleness and our mutual understanding, felt far from potential sisterhood. He started using it one day, after I’d sent him the usual message after a completed job. (It had been a suited man who worked at Marina Bay Financial Centre, Tower 1, one of our usual types. I’d knifed him twice, once in his right arm and once in his left, to ensure he couldn’t type (i.e. work) for some time. In my opinion the client had given this finance guy a real gift – the gift of absolute rest.)> x> Thx Ying Ying> what> Ying Ying. Ur new name> wtf it’s cui ying, don’t give me a stupid nickname> No job tonight right? Meet for drinks?> can, where?> TigerTiger wasn’t the name of the place, but it was the only place I’d ever had Tiger beer (the sort of beer a Camel smoker would drink) with Timo. It was a hawker centre in Yishun that was quiet in the day but became the neighbourhood’s refuge for beer-drinkers at night. When I showed up, Timo was wearing a soccer jersey and shorts, chatting with some of the early arrivals.“Ying Ying!” he yelled, waving.“It’s Cui Ying!” I yelled back as I close the distance between us. “Cui Ying!”“An zhua? We’ve been friends for so long liao.” A little thrown off, he sat us down and ordered two bottles of Tiger.“Ying Ying is weird. It’s weird from you.”This was when he told me about his original name, Wen Jie. Zhang Wen Jie. (“Ipoh represent, yo,” he said, flashing some nebulous gang signs.)“Eh, I call you Ying Ying, you call me Wen Jie lah.”“I prefer Timo, just like I prefer Cui Ying.”“Try it leh. W-en Ji-e.”I looked at his flushed and sweaty face.“Wen Jie.”“Veeery good!”Since then I’ve only made one other attempt to call him Wen Jie – a few months later when he confessed that he liked me and I told him very gently (I figured my job was at stake) that I didn’t feel the same way. Thankfully, I kept my job, and Timo moved on easily (new female recruits joined us a couple weeks later).The days get busier. I carefully store away my Kino vouchers and draft a text to Timo about work holidays. I punch unconscious a banker freshly emerged from his 9AM Uber in Raffles Place, bitch slap an auntie on her Monday morning wet market trip, knock over a primary school kid’s cone of roadside ice cream after classes end, knife a tuition franchise CEO’s shoulders in Din Tai Fung, trip a French expat on during the MRT evening rush between Caldecott and Marymount (very carefully timed, this one), and throw paint at the door of a loan shark in the dead of night. A few businesses take hits too, like the Bishan outlet of Popular (two stink bombs) and Toast Box at AMK Hub (knocked over their tower of butter, stole their box of self-service teaspoons).Julia and I text intermittently, when she’s not on a plane and when I’m not caught up inflicting pain on fellow residents of Singapore. It’s an easy friendship. She asks about my background (my Facebook profile informs her that I graduated with first-class honours in law), and I admit that I sucked at math (she’s a computer science graduate, first-class honours). This is the default sexy first social move of upper class or well-educated Singaporeans: asking where and what one studies or studied. Using the answer, we quickly place our selves in oppositions or unions on Singapore’s map of itself – a field of relations divided most cogently by race, class, and education. A map used only by the people it serves.It is a map that remains burnt into my brain, even when I speak or text in Singlish with Julia and Timo. My mother lost her shit when I chose to work at 7-Eleven after graduation. The guy who interviewed me asked me for my Identification Card and passport. How long had I lived in Singapore? Did I have any health conditions he should know about? Where had I worked previously? Did I have references he could call? He asked me how I’d found law. “It was really shit,” I reply. He nods. The interview ends. I get the job.My mother is relieved that I now work in “human resource”, even though, she reminds me during her weekly phone calls, I could be doing something very good with my hard-earned degree. I could be helping a lot of people. Today, as I plunge a penknife into the arm of a student napping in his university library, I think about how untrue that is.6Her period came last night, and she stained the sofa bed. Blood that leaves your body is a tricky thing, almost as finicky as words. She’s weighed a wet cloth down on the blood with one of his books, Revelations by Diane Arbus, and sits instead at the dining table. Her spine aches a little. She’s not sat upright in a while. She’s been listening to the same recording over and over again. She plays it again now. The words are oddly hypnotic, and though she still doesn’t understand the poems, she’s learnt sections of them from listening so many times. She mouths the words as he voices them: guó pò shān hé zài ， chéng chūn c?o mù shēn…, longing to hold the syllables between the soft of her tongue and the roof of her mouth, like hard candy. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese. The pinyin romanization has four accompanying tone marks: ˉ ˊ ˇ ˋ, each of which directs intonation. The first one is relatively high-pitched and stays on one note throughout; the second rises, resembling a question; the third dips and rises like the bounce of a ball; the fourth lands hard and staccato as though an order. Unlike English phonics, however, in Mandarin sounds do not unlock words. Though there are recurring radicals in the characters, each one must be learnt by heart, especially in writing. She doesn’t have a good memory, but remembers her first Mandarin workbook in kindergarten. Square boxes to write the characters in, and dotted lines with arrows guiding the direction of each stroke. When learning to write Mandarin it’s easiest to begin with the character for one, 一, a single horizontal stroke written from left to right. There’s a stack of old newspapers on the dining table, from before her rest. Then, she’d taken the newspapers out for recycling every week. At the beginning of her self-exile from labour, she’d cancelled the subscription. The newspaper pile no longer grew and she ceased to see it, just like she’d stopped seeing the crumbs on the floor, or the dust on the windows. The mop leaned against the corner of the toilet, defiantly dry. Cockroaches laid eggs between bristles of the broom.She pulls the top newspaper toward her. She finds a pen in his drawers and begins to write: 一，二，三， 四，五… She reaches one hundred, 一百。 Then: 开心，伤心，生气，害怕，悲伤。花草树木。森林。爸爸，妈妈，孩子。眼睛。自卑。准备。嗨还海害。可爱。依赖。How many words before she runs out? She’s studied the language for at least a decade, and used it for nearly five. Her parents often spoke to her in Mandarin. According to Google the average native speaker with a higher education knows 10,000 words, with a passive vocabulary of 20,000. How is it that she so often ran out of words while speaking to him? He was a native speaker. Was she?She scrolls through the eleven recordings she’s been saving. They feel like bubbles of old air trapped in ice, exhaling into a new world as the ice melts away. She’s trying to slow down the process, to find a way to savour it before they all come to an end. The second longest recording lasts twelve minutes and fourteen seconds. She’s reading an article for him, possibly from the Economist, one of the many English publications he’d hoped to conquer. He interrupts her at points, asking for the meanings of words he doesn’t know. “Egregious?”“Very bad.”“Daunting?”“Intimidating, scary, 可怕.”“Punctilicious?”“Uh…做事小心，准确.”I was aware that my translations, where I could provide them, were poor. But they were the best that I could do, and he never complained. Sometimes he seemed to arrive at a more precise translation on his own, by scrutinizing the gap between my subpar ones and his understanding of the article. He would exclaim a word or phrase in Mandarin, triumphant, and scribble it down. His translations remained impenetrable to me, the first, failed translator.After I complete my first reading, he asks me to read it again, for a complete copy he can listen to without his interruptions. I listen to myself read a second time. It occurs to me that I’ve not heard my voice like this before, played back to me, estranged from my body. It sounds like the voice of an energetic woman, her fuel burning without end. This woman wakes first when her children start crying. She clicks her heels together for good luck. She arrives at the office before everyone else. She toils earnestly among men, running the tractor through the fields. She kills the animal for meat for her family.7The first sign of a world off balance:> hi cui ying, I’ve been thinking about telling you this for a while. I really like talking to you, and honestly I’ve been attracted to you since we met on that flight. is that weird? I’m sorry. what I mean is that I like you a lot. I think you’re a really sweet person. can we talk sometime? if I’ve made you uncomfortable I’m really sorry. take your time to reply? it's okay if you don’t feel the same way.I’ve a busy day today (four hits), so I shelve Julia’s message. She’s a good soul, but I’ve little to say in response. Love is inconceivable at this point, and bodies are soft targets, not objects of affection. She didn’t use any Singlish, either, which unsettles me a little.My first hit is a British expat called Tom, a hedge fund manager, who lives in Bukit Timah. The client requested for cuts to the face. As I wait in the multi-storey carpark where he’s due to show up for a brunch meeting nearby, I feel an itch in my left thigh. It feels like hives. Scratching with one hand, I keep my other wrapped around the knife in my right pocket. I’m crouched near a large SUV, with a clear view of the carpark entrance.A black Mercedes drives in. It’s the right car plate number. A faint thrill rises in my stomach, as though feeling the beat of a party from a town away. The itch is getting worse. I slap the spot a few times, hoping the pain will mute or mask it. The Mercedes drives past where I am. Once it heads up to the next level, I make a run for the stairs. I peer out briefly at each floor, tracking the car. It goes all the way up to the top floor. I’m panting slightly as I reach. No chauffeur – one less body to take out. The British expat leaving the car is well-built; his muscles strain his suit. His blonde hair reminds me of the coat of a lioness I saw on National Geographic. Everything on his body looks expensive. I call for my Uber. Twelve minutes.I grip my knife and wait in the lift lobby. I press the button. He comes in. Barely glances at me. We wait. The lift is old and slow, but arrives empty. Once it closes us in I draw near him and pull the blade toward his face. He punches me too quickly. Blood in my mouth. He kicks me viciously in the stomach and chest. Wrests my knife from me and cuts across my arms, my shoulders.“Bitch.” He spits. His accent is thick. “Who paid you to do this?”“I don’t know,” I gasp. “I’m just working for my boss.”“If you want to do something like this, you should at least be a man. Take my advice. Do something easier. Maybe work as an escort once your wounds recover.”“Asshole.” I’m rasping now, losing strength.“Hey.” He nudges my bleeding arm with the tip of his leather shoes. I stifle a moan. “You should be gentle with that language. It isn’t yours. Though you guys have done well with it. What’s that thing people say? Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”The lift dings open. He leaves to brunch, still holding on to my knife.I push my body off the ground very slowly. My phone rings.“Hello?” “Eh hallo, it’s your Uber. I’m just outside the carpark. Where are you?”“Ah. Uh uncle, can you help me? I’ll pay extra.”“You got a lot of things to carry is it? Where are you?”“I’m in the carpark, at the ground floor lift lobby. I’m injured. Can you come in and get me?”“Eh girl, you sound very weak. What happened ah? Fight ah? Eh if you’re injured then don’t set your pick up point outside lah. I’m driving in now.”A Suzuki Swift pulls up near the lift lobby. I’m faint at this point, my clothes wet with blood, making me shiver. A man, hardly old enough to be an uncle, runs out, his eyes widening as he sees me.“Eh nabe, wha’appen? Shit. You better pay me a lot extra, girl. I’m gonna need to clean my seats.”He hoists me to my feet by my waist, and walks me to the car.“Nabe. Eh this kind of thing cannot call Uber leh, girl. Some more you never put in the remarks when you book. Uber is not an ambulance service leh. Some more I’m only an UberX leh. Nabe. Don’t worry, I drive very fast one. KKH can right?”He rambles on, rattled and shaking as he closes my door and jogs to the driver’s seat.“Fuck lah.” He keeps swearing. I’ve not said anything to him; I’m too weak.“Girl. Eh, girl. You still conscious not? Hello? Shit.”“I’m conscious,” I say very softly. “I’ll pay you. And you’re not an uncle.”He laughs, his pale face warming up a bit.The driver stays with me at the hospital, grumbling as the doctor, also male, frowns at my injuries.“Did you call the police?” is the first thing he says to me.“No. It was an accident.”“Really?”“Yes.”“Who’s that guy who brought you in?”“My Uber driver.”“You didn’t call for an ambulance?”“No.”“Why’s he still here?”“I’m supposed to pay him extra.”He shakes his head. His clean, skinny fingers pull neat stitches across my skin. Despite his disapproval, he is very careful, very tender. I text Timo.> o> Whr r u??> kkh> Fuck. Coming8Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge Law graduate and former prime minister of Singapore, had decided that though British rule had passed, we would retain English as our common language. Our lingua franca, as I was taught to call it by my GP tutor. We had to learn a compulsory second language next to it, a “mother tongue” chosen from Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil.“You guys were lucky,” my husband had said to me, raising his head from his notebook of English words. He’d had an English test coming up at the language centre he attended. “The bilingual thing didn’t work,” I’d replied. “Most of us are only good at one of the two. If you’re good at English, chances are you suck at your mother tongue. And vice versa.”“Still more bilingual than me. And a lot of the world.”“I don’t know. I think English is just the language of money. There’s no soul.”“Money’s important. A soul’s can’t pay for groceries or electricity.”“Well. Chinese is more beautiful than English.”“English is more powerful.”“I suppose.”“If nothing else, you at least need it to understand the Americans.”“I think America’s falling. China’s really powerful now, and everyone’s trying to learn Chinese. ”“All the more we need to understand English. If we’re going to build a new world, we need to understand how things are collapsing.”She didn’t reply after that. A light wind blew in through the window, rustling their house plants and their laundry drying on bamboo poles. A neighbour from the floor below hummed a song – 甜蜜蜜Sweet as honey你笑得甜蜜蜜Your smile is sweet as honey好像花儿开在春风里Just like the flowers blooming in the spring wind开在春风里Blooming in the spring wind在哪里在哪里见过你Where? Where have I seen you before?你的笑容这样熟悉Your smile is so very familiar我一时想不起For a moment I can’t seem to recall啊~~在梦里Ah, in my dreamsShe’s listening to him read again. Those same poems, for sixteen minutes and twenty three seconds. She’s transcribed them in hanyu pinyin since she doesn’t know the words. Now she reads as he reads, her mouth pacing with his mouth, her voice interlocking with his voice. She may still not know the meanings of the poems, but her lips carry their words. She reads it again, aloud, without the recording, and again, with her hair tucked behind her ears. She reads it facing the left window, and facing the right window. She reads it as slowly as possible, then as quickly as possible. She reads it angrily. She reads it with the windows open, hoping the neighbours will hear her.Finally, she reads it for the voice recorder, as its thirteenth clip. She rests it carefully on the dining table, arranges her body upright in her seat, and gingerly presses the record button.The first poem, which she has practiced the most, feels well-worn, intimate:“guó pò shān hé zài, chéng chūn c?o mù shēn。g?n shí huā jiàn lèi, hèn bié ni?o jīng xīn。fēng hu? lián sān yuè, jiā shū d? wàn jīn。 bái tóu sāo gèng du?n, hún yù bù shèng zān。”And the last poem is the one she likes the most:“kōng shān xīn y? hòu, tiān qì w?n lái qiū。míng yuè sōng jiān zhào, qīng quán shí shàng liú。zhú xuān guī huàn nǚ, lián dòng xià yú zhōu。 suí yì chūn fāng xiē, wáng sūn zì k? liú。”The clip is sixteen minutes and fifteen seconds long. She listens to it once, it gives her a thrill, a buzz of joy, she likes how it sounds. She takes the SD card out and sends the recording to him via email. All she writes in the email is: “我读了。” I’ve read it. That night, she sleeps feverishly, and doesn’t wake till days later.9When I wake up, the Singaporean bitch who tried to knife me is smoking one of my cigars.“Are these knockoffs?” she asks. “Taste like shit.”There’s a thundering pain at the base of my head. My wrists and ankles are tied. A ceiling fan spins above me, making me shiver. I’m naked. Where the fuck am I?There’s a knock. As I realize I’m in a closed room, she heads out the door and shuts it behind her. I hear a man yelling outside.“You kidnapped him, AND you brought him here? Ji bai. Your head got problem is it? The client didn’t ask for a follow-up. What the fuck. Nabe. Eh, I don’t care how you do it okay, you get him out of here by today. You work for me. You want revenge you go somewhere else. You want work here you don’t anyhow, you think you very big is it?”I can’t hear what she says to him, but it doesn’t sound very apologetic. A harsh murmur. She comes back in, walks to me, and slaps my face. I see her stitches from when I cut her sorry ass.“Not an escort yet?” I say.She slaps me again. “Listen, you ji bai asshole. I’m gonna let you go in a week. And when I let you go, you’re not going to report any of this to anyone. You’re going to go on living your stupid chao ji bai life. Maybe you’ll go back to wherever you came from.”I laugh. “Is this some kind of prank? Some local hazing?” “You think I kidnapped you for fun?”“I don’t know what people like you do. I’m going to call the cops on you when you let me go. Also, you’re going to have to speak better English if you want me to understand what you’re saying.”She punches me square in the face. “死ang moh.”Cultural conversion therapy, she calls it. Every morning she feeds me something from the nearby hawker centre for breakfast, my only meal for the day. Bee hoon with luncheon meat, porridge, tau huey, you tiao, bak chor mee, kway chap,… I learn their names by heart because she slaps me until I get them right. She doesn’t let me have bread, or English breakfast tea. Not even earl grey. Not a slice of bacon, or a sausage, or any baked beans. No avocado. At night I lie in my makeshift cell, shaking, sweating, and puking into a bucket. I dream of cold sandwiches and steak bakes. After breakfast till night, I watch Singaporean films, music videos, and advertisements stretching from the 1990s to the present. My corneas burn with their bodies – walking, dancing, laughing, sobbing – in all forms, all spaces, all shapes. All the while my wrists and ankles remain bound. The worst of them is E8 by some local personality called Preetipls. The Singaporean bitch uses her phone to record me rapping along as I gyrate my hips on the floor:Step into a cab like woahRacist uncle, woahAsk where my accent go?Now bro you need to gobié wèn w? w? cóng ná l? láiwèn w? yào qù ná l?Preetipls qiú qiú n?M?i lì qiú qiú n?At night, before I get to sleep, I speak Singlish for five minutes into a voice recorder. She listens to the recording after and writes down a tally: one point for every unique Singlish word or phrase I use, one point for every correct usage, negative five for any mistake, and negative ten if I don’t use at least ten unique words or phrases. If I get a positive total score, I get to have an oven-baked chip. The week goes on, the same every day save a few kinks. My captor records me singing advertisement jingles. She films me crying for a sausage roll. One day she gives me a bite of her ham sandwich and I burst into tears. I earn an oven-baked chip twice.There is no finale when the week ends. She drives me, blindfolded, to Orchard Road, where, after a hug, she sets me free. I throw a rock at her car as she drives off, and earn some dirty stares from the tourists. Then, my body light from being untied, I walk weightlessly down the street, passing brand-flaunting locals and tourists with straw hats and sunglasses. The air smells different from when I last walked free in this country. It smells a little sweeter, like sugar caramelizing, and then burning. 10Timo won’t talk to me, but work is work, so my days are quickly busy again. I don’t hear from my expat, Tom, and I catch myself thinking about him. Has he begun to understand?My last job today is in the Central Library in Bugis. I spot my target in the romance section – a young man with bleached blonde hair. I knock him out against a shelf, stab him in the shoulder, and make a beeline for the exit. My Uber should have arrived.As I pass the reading area, I spot a woman who looks like me. She’s poring over the library’s copy of the New York Times, barely noticing the commotion rising up in the romance section. Her dark hair falls forward onto the newsprint, grazing against it slightly as she reads, lifting off as she reaches to turn the page. She looks up and spots me, her searching eyes resembling mine. Something grips my chest. I run over and stick my knife into her neck. Then, turning away before she screams, before I see what I’ve done, I let go of the hilt, and run.EPILOGUEShe is woken by her phone ringing. Groggy and heavy with sleep, she picks up.“Hello?”“It’s me. I got your email. You read the poems really well.” She recognizes his voice, but his English has become crisp and elegant, without anxiety. For some reason, she finds this funny. She laughs.“好久不见,” she says. “通话哪儿能算见面。”“你好吗？过得如何？”“不错。How are you?”“也不错。读诗读到累了。”“You read really well. It was good to hear your voice again.”“Thanks.”“Did you listen to all the recordings?”“Not yet. I’m planning to.”“Let me know what they are when you do. I can’t remember what I recorded anymore.”“Sure.” A pause, as she finds the words. “好奇怪，你的声音又熟悉又陌生。”“Yours too,” he replies. “Your Chinese got a lot better. 进步好多。”“你的英文也是。厉害。”“Thank you.” She can hear him smile.It’s like a first meeting with a stranger. An encounter with a new body and its many unfamiliar gestures, tics, scents, sounds. It’s a different version of him and a different version of her, tangents traceable back to the curves they intersect, but arriving with unique and particular equations. That’s what she wants to say, but neither English nor Mandarin feels like the right language.“Your Singlish got improve anot?” she asks.“哇，用另外个语言对付我。 No, my Singlish never improve one,” he says awkwardly, laughing at himself. “How’s that?”“过关！” They laugh.“听到你的声音真的很开心，很舒服。能再打给你吗？”“那你多读几首诗给我听。交换声音。”“好。”“你去忙你的吧。”“好，下次见。”“不，下次听。”“永远不见面吗？” “不是啦。暂时想倾听。一生看的东西多，听的东西少。多了我们也不注意。”“好。我也注意听。”“再听。”“好，再听。”After they hang up, she goes to one of the windows and sticks her head out. The hot sunlight pelts onto her skin, making it tingle as though hit by rain. “我感受到了。” I felt it. ................
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