We, The Survivors. Tash Aw

me some time to make out the letters in reverse. I started to laugh. Who takes the time to stand outside a phone booth and call the prime minister a cunt? That was exactly when Mr Lai answered. I tried to explain who I was, and why I was calling, but it was difficult because I was still chuckling. ‘You’re in a good mood,’ he said. ‘I like cheerful people.’ A week later I was working at his fish farm near Tanjung Karang.

      At first I worked as a farm hand – a labourer – repairing, lifting, transporting. There were only two cages to start with, but more were already being built, and I was soon joined by two Indonesians, Halim and Adi, then Rio, Indra, Yudianto, Satria, Bayu, Adit, Rendy, Adra, Eka. [Pauses.] Rama, Hanif, Abdi, Firman, Leo, Dimas, Denny, Fariz, Endang – they came later. After all this time I can remember all their names. Very few of them stayed for long. Six months, one year – that wasn’t uncommon; a year was good, two years was unusual. Even after all the agencies started making big bucks by bringing in workers and tying them to three-year contracts, and deducting a whole year’s salary from their pay packages before they even started their jobs, they’d still go missing. When you saw how hard they worked, you’d understand why. It wasn’t that their spirits could not accept the wages – four, five hundred bucks a month – it was that their bodies could not tolerate the work.

      Not long ago I read something on Facebook that talked about minimum wages for migrant workers. I don’t know how it came up on my Facebook – usually it’s a lot of links to Joel Osteen videos or other devotional stuff, or badminton or soccer – but this time it was an article about how some people in KL, a human rights group or something, were trying to establish basic rights for the millions of foreigners working here. Of course they were going to fail! Even I could have told them that. They kept complaining about the lack of political will – government this, government that. What struck me and made me shake my head was all the nonsense they said about money. Migrant wages are degrading, they humiliate the soul. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t the pay that destroyed the spirits of these men and women, it was the work – the way it broke their bodies before they could even contemplate the question of salaries. The way it turned them from children to withered old creatures in the space of a few years. Anyone can work with their body like that for a year, two years, maybe even more. But when those years stretch out before you like the sea on a calm hot day, waveless, with no change or variety – when that kind of life becomes your only future, that’s when you flee. Even if someone pays you ten thousand a month, your body won’t accept it. Your mind tells you to stay, to earn money for your kids back home, your old parents who need help. But your body says: Run.

      The first few months, I worked with the foreigners, sometimes even getting into the water to fix the cages with them, or carrying ten tons of sand from one end of the land to the other in wheelbarrows when we were constructing the office and other farm buildings. We wore loose-fitting shirts to protect us from the sun, but later, when the sun had gone down and we were bathing, I could see how our bodies were marked by the sun – the skin on our faces, necks and hands was three shades darker than the rest of ourselves, as if it belonged to someone else, a person less fortunate than us. I took to tying a small towel around my neck to keep the sun from burning me. I knotted it at the front, so that I could untie it easily to wipe the sweat from my face, and the men started to make fun of me. Hey Mr Cowboy, they joked. John Wayne just came to work!

      One day Mr Lai arrived and found me mixing concrete with the Indonesian labourers. I heard him shouting even before he stopped the car. He rolled down the window. ‘Why you waste your time doing this kind of work? Go check the generators, check the inventory – something useful.’ I stared at him, blinking. Sweat was dripping into my eyes and suddenly I felt very hot. ‘Stare what? Foreman also do this dirty work? Give them instructions already can, no need to join in.’ The word foreman stayed in my head as I washed myself in the makeshift shower we’d built in the shade of some trees. The newness of the word spun gently in my head, as clear as the sunlight that was filtering through the thin canopy of leaves above, falling around me like shards of splintered glass. Maybe there was something wrong with my eyes that day, maybe I’d been working too long in the sun.

      I understood that I would hold power over other human beings – that it was possible for me to impose my will on the actions of men who were just like me, whose bodies worked like mine, whose desperation and joy I not only recognised but shared. Were we friends? Of course not. I never went to their lodgings, they never came to mine. In the evenings they disappeared into the night, and I withdrew to my own space. We understood that we would never be buddies, but somehow that drew us together. Friendship is not a requirement for closeness. During the day, those long, long days under the sun and rain, we experienced pain in the same way, and satisfaction and laughter too, but mostly hardship, and that is what bound us.

      Now, someone had given me the right to tell these men what to do. In the space of a few seconds, we were no longer the same – perhaps we never had been, and I had been a fool to think otherwise. It sounds stupid, but all at once I did feel different from them. As I walked back to the grey concrete box that housed the office, I looked at the men shovelling sand and cement, wheeling barrowloads of hardcore, carrying sacks of grit on their shoulders. Not one of them looked up at me – they just continued in exactly the same way. It was as if they knew that something had changed, that I had detached from their world, and no longer belonged to it. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like calling out to them, making a joke about Adi’s permanent limp or how Bayu couldn’t stop talking while he worked – the usual bad jokes that we made all the time. But it didn’t feel right. A space had opened up between us, and they recognised it as much as I did. Mr Lai was nearby, walking down to the jetty, and if I’d called out to the men and joked with them, he’d have heard and said something nasty. I had no choice but to walk on.

      I tucked my shirt into my trousers and went into the office. All around me there were piles of papers and files containing bills, invoices. I opened a folder and stared at the words and numbers that meant nothing to me. Soon, in just a few months’ time, I’d learn how to decipher what was going on, but I never completely forgot the panic that I experienced that first day. You won’t understand that feeling – being powerless in front of a sheet of paper. I told myself, It’s just a stupid piece of paper. The last time I saw so many pages of numbers or words I was at school, and that had been years ago. Even then, I’d been defeated by them – more or less flunked my SPM, even got a D in Chinese and mathematics. Only got one good grade, in history – C4 – which was a joke, because the past means nothing to me. Nothing. All across the country, probably no one failed as badly as I did. Seventeen years old, couldn’t wait to leave school. Already, back then, I’d thought: damn waste of time, thank God I won’t have to bother with reading and writing ever again. How would I know that I’d have to learn it all over again?

      I looked out at the men working in the yard, listened to the sound of the shovels against grit, the soft rumble of the cement mixer – all of it was like the rhythm of a strange music, lulling me to sleep as I sat in front of the files. The table fan was blowing in my face and making me drowsy. Wake up. Wake up. I knew that if I truly wanted to become the person I was supposed to be, I would have to make sense of those papers in front of me.

      I heard Mr Lai approaching, and pretended to be examining the files as he walked in. ‘We have to get some parts for the generator,’ I said. ‘Nothing major, just one small fitting that will help us save money in the long run.’ I don’t know how I knew that, but I did – must have picked it up in a previous job. Mr Lai hesitated, then nodded. ‘I’ll give you some cash.’ He was almost out of the room when he turned back and said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll buy a safe for the office. I’ll bring over a few thousand bucks to keep in it – you can look after it for the time being.’

      After he left I sat at the desk and watched the men work. Their arms rising and falling, their legs planted deep in mounds of earth and sand, trousers rolled up to their knees. Rio was wearing a pair of fake Real Madrid shorts that were too big for him, tightened with a belt and hanging past his knees. He and Halim were hauling some bags of cement towards the mixer, walking swiftly with small steps, their bare feet making tracks in the earth. Their knees buckled slightly now and then, and I remembered that same sensation in my own legs just a couple of hours