We, The Survivors. Tash Aw

I wasn’t good at school, I understood that all those big industries further inland which were making cars and air-conditioners and washing machines and American sneakers – they lay close to the same river that washed over our cockle beds, forty, fifty miles away, and they would just carry on emptying their waste into the river, more and more as the years went by. I didn’t even feel sad, or angry – why get mad over something you can’t change? That was just the way things were.

      The only thing that infuriated me was that no one wanted to listen to me when I told them what I thought was happening. Pollution? My grandmother repeated the word as if it was some bizarre other-worldly phenomenon, like an interplanetary collision in another solar system. She turned her back on me and went to the temple. ‘Don’t know what they teach you in school these days.’

      Whenever anyone came back from the temple, they’d talk about destiny. To live like this is our destiny. I never thought about the meaning of fate and chance until I was in prison, and ideas just came to me during those long hours when I was lying on my bed doing nothing. What would have happened if my grandparents had landed further up the coast, or drifted south? If the winds or tides had been stronger or weaker and had carried them to Perak or Johor, or to Port Klang itself? Would I have been a dock worker or a sailor, or maybe a ship’s captain? That would have been fun. If they’d landed somewhere else on the coast, where they weren’t trapped between river and sea, maybe they’d have travelled inland and gone straight to a city. Maybe then, I would have become you.

      I’m just kidding. Of course I couldn’t have become you. I know it’s not that simple. And I don’t mean that I want to become you, or someone like you. It’s just that sometimes I can’t help thinking about whether I was really destined to be me.

       October 10th

      The dispute was about money, as it always is. That’s why the man died. It wasn’t because of a woman, as some of the papers suggested. People like us don’t fight over love, we fight over houses, land, sometimes cars, mostly money – things that make a difference to the way we live.

      About five, six weeks before the night in question, I got a call at work. Hendro, one of the Indonesians who’d been working for us for some time, came running up to the edge of the water, shouting, Boss, boss, telephone. His head was wrapped in his usual blue-and-white bandana, his hands blackened with grease as he signalled for me to go to the office. From a distance, he looked like a superhero cartoon toy, stout and smiling, even though he’d been working since daybreak, tarring the dirt yard in front of the small office building with a few of the other guys, transforming it into a proper car park with a tarmac surface so the cars and scooters wouldn’t churn up the mud in the rainy season. We were getting more and more visitors then, people coming up from KL and as far as Alor Setar to inspect the farm and witness for themselves the quality of our produce, our new filtration systems, the freshness of the water, the hygiene levels. They needed to be sure of these things before they signed supply contracts with us, so we had to impress them. We couldn’t have their cars sinking into the red mud or arriving back in town looking as if they’d driven to the Sahara and back. My boss had money then, business was good.

      I started to make my way across the walkways, back towards the shore. I’d been supervising the release of the newest batch of hatchlings. Sea bass, that’s what we were concentrating on that year, we knew the price of it would be high. There’d always been demand from Chinese restaurants, but then the upscale Western places started serving it too. A couple of our customers, who ran a neighbourhood restaurant somewhere in Petaling Jaya, showed us their menu – our fish might be selling at the same price as fancy imported produce like salmon and cod. ‘You kidding me?’ I said. ‘Local people really paying these kinds of prices for sea bass – you sure it’s not Westerners?’ They assured my boss it was easy. Their clients preferred fresh local produce, they didn’t want stuff that was frozen and flown all the way from Australia or Alaska. Their restaurant was just a café, it didn’t look anything special, but it was selling sea bass fillets at fifty, sixty ringgit a serving. I thought of that money as I watched the tiny fish swim slowly out of the plastic bags, shimmering against the dark water like a bright silver cloud. A hundred bucks each on someone’s plate in the city.

      I couldn’t stop thinking about the value of those fragile little fish as I walked along the wooden planks lashed to the floating oil drums. The farm had grown in recent times, and each year we added another few pens to the existing ones – floating cages framed by timber squares on the surface that served as walkways, the nets suspended in the water below. That year, the twelfth of the farm’s existence, we had grown to twenty enclosures, five of them added in the last few months alone. I liked the neatness of the grid, knew my way around it, was quick on my feet, never losing my balance even if I had to run along the narrow decks in bad weather, when the water was choppy and the wind was up. I’d stand and look down at the fish thrashing at the surface of the water as the men threw in the feed, feeling the platform bob gently under my feet as the fish disturbed the water. And I’d be happy that I no longer had to jump in to repair the netting or retrieve plastic bags and bottles and other debris that got blown in by the storms. I’d grown up by the sea, but it remained unpredictable to me, always capable of change and destruction.

      It took me a while to get back to the jetty, and I thought that the caller would have hung up by then. People get fed up of waiting, especially young people – everyone is in a hurry all the time. Hendro walked to the office with me, complaining about all the work they had to do. It was just him and two other Indonesians resurfacing the car park – Budi and Joyo, who were newer, who didn’t know how to operate the machinery. They were slow, he had to show them how to do everything. Hendro had to deal with one of the generators too, which had blown up the previous night and needed to be fixed by the end of the day. A cage had been ripped and needed to be mended. One of the jetties had to be repaired. Then there was the maintenance of the pens, checking the water filters, doing the feeding rounds – he was having to do it all. They stupid, boss, they stupid. I laughed. When I started out here at the farm, I did all that work myself. And I never complained, I just did what needed to be done. ‘Aiya, people these days,’ I told him, ‘they just like to complain about everything. Damn migrant worker also complain, how can?’ We laughed. ‘Get the tarmac done first, the other jobs can wait until later.’

      He knew that if he did everything well and didn’t cause any trouble, with all the new work we were getting, I’d make sure Mr Lai gave him some extra cash at the end of the month to send back to his wife and daughter in Java – nothing much, fifty, a hundred ringgit maybe, two hundred at Hari Raya. Sometimes, if I felt that he’d done a lot of work that month, or if we’d had a particularly difficult time with the weather or supplies, and the boss only gave him a small tip, I’d give him some extra cash from my own pocket. He’d been with us for four years, and I thought he deserved something good – it was unusual for a worker to stay that long.

      The boss didn’t notice all that – the physical work we did on the farm, or the men who did it. He’d started spending more and more time on the road, searching for bigger clients farther afield – his latest obsession back then was the big supermarket chains in the Klang Valley, Tesco and Carrefour and suchlike. Some weeks he didn’t even show up at the farm one single day. Most days it was just me keeping an eye on the place, supervising twelve workers. It was always difficult to find good Indonesians, men who’d stick at the job and didn’t steal or cheat or gamble their earnings away – that was what the boss always said, and I think that’s why he could never remember their names. He didn’t want to know about their lives, didn’t want to think of them as real people – it was easier that way when one of them suddenly didn’t turn up for work. You lose a man like that, of course you wonder what’s happened to him. Maybe he’d been hit by a bus in the night while coming back from one of the brothels down near the port, or he’d died in a fight or got picked up by the police, or just decided enough was enough and headed back to Kalimantan without bothering to collect his wages.

      Stay in the business long enough, you hear all kinds of stories about what happens to these foreign workers. Just that week, three workers from the sheet metal factory down the road went missing and were found two