We, The Survivors. Tash Aw

than he ever did when he was at school. When his mother smiles and says, ‘Good boy. Education is your future. Study hard so that you don’t end up like me,’ he feels a sudden quickening of his pulse, the guilt cutting at his insides like the knife he has started to carry around for the gang fights that he will very soon get involved in.

      (At this precise point in time his mother is between jobs. Every morning she goes out in search of work, every day she comes back with nothing to show but a promise of work that never comes true. This lasts about a month, until she becomes a shampoo girl at a salon in Cheras called Angelique D’Style.)

      He decides to get some cash. It’s the only way to relieve his guilt. (This is my analysis of his situation, not his – he never talked much about things like guilt or obligation.) By this time he’s hanging around with boys who are nineteen, twenty, even a bit older. They’ve been running businesses for a few years, selling fake DVDs, small electronics – you know the type. Their friends and associates own stalls all over the city, Chow Kit Road, Low Yat Plaza, the top floor of Sungai Wang, you name it. But mainly their money comes from drugs – the boys are low-level dealers. Syabu, fengtau, ice, G, K – whatever name it goes by, they sell it.

      You’re looking at me like you don’t know what all that is. Amphetamines, in all their forms, streaming over the border from Laos and Thailand. There would have been harder, more expensive stuff floating around too, heroin and coke I guess, but Keong and his friends wouldn’t have got their hands on that kind of junk so often, if ever at all. He’s still a kid, remember, barely sixteen. The cash he makes is small change for a serious dealer. Most of the time he just sits at the front of a cramped stall in Bukit Bintang selling portable electronics, Discmans, VCR players, Nintendo – the sort of thing every other stall in the area seems to sell. Every so often someone asks him for some pills, and he casually walks over to another stall fifty yards away, and after a few minutes one of his friends will come over with a small packet. Sometimes he’s the runner, carrying a plastic sachet from one place to another. He’s young enough for the police to ignore.

      Still, the money he makes allows him to buy new clothes, the kind all the young gangsters favour – ‘carrot-cut’ trousers, baggy around the ass and clinging tightly to the ankles, shirts with sharp shoulders, a small diamond stud in his left ear. He wants to look like Alan Tam Wing-Lun or one of the other Hong Kong singing superstars. He does look like Alan Tam! That’s what he thinks. But really – even I could see it when he proudly showed me photos of him and his heng tai, who were not really his brothers in any sense of the word, because they wouldn’t come to his aid when he needed them – he ends up with the look that his teachers at school would identify as samseng or Ah Beng. Boys who will soon quit school and become stallholders or dim sum waiters on the outside, petty gangsters on the inside.

      One evening Keong is delivering some bundles of cash to a building in Jalan Pudu – he doesn’t know who or what the money’s for. He’s just been given the address, which he’s committed to memory so he doesn’t have to write it on his palm like he did the last time. Sor hai, no brain, meh? his friends had teased him (how innocent and stupid he’d been!). He’s only delivering a thousand ringgit, hardly enough to buy a decent second-hand scooter, but still, not worth taking the risk. Not that Keong recognises much risk – he feels invincible these days, with his band of brothers and cash in his pocket. It comes as a surprise when two police motorbikes pull up ahead of him – big powerful white bikes, surprisingly quiet, unlike the noisy scooters that his friends ride. He assumes they’ve stopped for someone else, or are just taking a break for an early-evening drink, but instead they walk swiftly towards him, backing him up against the wall. He doesn’t care, he acts tough. Why you stopping me? he says, somewhat aggressively, which only inflames them further. You got warrant? No warrant cannot arrest. Why? Because I’m Chinese is it? They push him against the wall, take off his backpack and find the money, neatly bound by rubber bands in tight little stacks. When they take them out, they look like small bricks.

      Chinese kid with a load of cash in his bag – no further explanation needed. Samseng. They slap him round the head.

      Still, he is proud, unrepentant. At the police station he sits in a cell waiting for his brothers to turn up, maybe even the legendary ultimate big boss, who he knows by reputation but has never met, the one people say is best friends with the inspector general of police. After he’s been there a day, then two, he realises that he’s been forgotten. Even the police who patrol the cells seem barely to notice his presence. They give him water and rice with sambal – no egg or chicken or anything – that he eats quickly because he’s so hungry, but it makes him sick, gives him terrible diarrhoea that lasts for a whole day, so when they finally let him out it’s obvious that it’s only because he was stinking up his cell too much. Even the two Indonesians in the lock-up were complaining about how disgusting it smelled.

      In the end it wasn’t his brush with the police that ended his brief career as a gangster, it was his mother. He’d thought she’d be happy with the money he gave her from time to time, that even if she suspected what he was doing to earn it, she’d turn a blind eye because they needed it so much. Now she could pay the electricity bill. Now she could buy some herbs to make chicken soup to give herself strength for work. Twice he’d bought her a blouse from Petaling Street because he wanted her to have new clothes to wear to work, but she made a point of never putting them on – and it hurt him to see how these gifts disgusted her. He’d thought she would be happy, but she just accepted whatever money he gave her without expressing gratitude. She looked away each time he handed it to her, the notes folded up so she couldn’t see exactly how much it was. ‘Being a part-time waiter pays well these days,’ was all she said. And then, one Sunday when they were both at home watching TV, she said, ‘I had a craving for noodles yesterday after work, so I went to Wanchai Noodle House. Asked if you were working there that day.’

      Keong waited for her to say, ‘They told me they didn’t know anyone by that name.’ Waited for the embarrassment and guilt and anger, wondered for a second how he should react, whether to be confrontational, scream at her, smash the furniture, set something on fire – anything to deal with the pain. But she said nothing more, just continued watching TV silently.

      Two weeks later they were down here, living in our village.

      What a shithole.

      His mother had found a job in a factory processing fish – gutting and scaling them and packaging them for delivery to supermarkets. My mother had once worked in that factory too. It was new, it wasn’t so bad. Her hours were long but regular, her salary small but regular. She’d been born in the area, spent her whole life until the age of twenty-two in Tanjung Karang, just up the coast. A relative had told her about a house that had become vacant in Bagan Sungai Yu, two bedrooms, a big front room, a kitchen – just right for a woman, not young, not old, and her son, no longer a child but years away from becoming a man. It was a bit out of the way, but she didn’t mind, she had a scooter and Keong could cycle into town if he needed to. There were bridges across the river now, it wasn’t so hard to get around. She didn’t know what they’d do, she didn’t have a plan – she just knew she had to move back to these parts and stay for as long as she could.

      She still had family up the road, an aunt and an uncle, two cousins, and that seemed plenty. She could call them and get together for dinner once in a while – it wasn’t a fancy life, but it felt as if it would never change much, in fact hadn’t changed much since she’d left two decades before. What she’d hated back then, she now loved: the sense of continuity, of surrendering to something stronger than her – the pulling in of her horizons, the comfort to be found in the death of ambition. She had forgotten what it was that she’d wanted to accomplish when she’d left home for the city, but whatever that dream was, it had caused too much anxiety and pushed her towards bad decisions. Now it was gone, she could start to live again. Years later, I would recognise the same feeling, and I would think of her, this round-faced woman who said little but smiled a lot, her cheeks pulled into small dimples. Auntie Chai. She always asked me to come round for some biscuits and a cold drink whenever our paths crossed, but somehow it rarely happened, even in a village as small as ours.

      Only