We, The Survivors. Tash Aw

up with and had always thought would end up in jail. We even joked about it when he left KL to find work elsewhere. ‘Don’t worry about an address,’ I’d told him, ‘I’ll just come looking for you in prison.’

      After the lawyer’s admonishment he fell silent once more – a husband, a proper father, someone you could trust to hold a family together. That’s the image of him that comes to me from time to time these days. A respectable man, beyond hatred.

      It was only much later that I realised I’d only spent three years in jail. Three years – that’s nothing! Why did it feel so long when I was in my cell? And how did Keong change so quickly? That’s when I felt bitter. I’d never held a grudge against him, not even for coming back to Klang and bringing Evil into my life. When I talked about it to members of the church some years later they said, You must forgive him the way God forgives you. And I thought, There’s nothing for me to forgive; I don’t feel anything towards him. But when I saw him in the courtroom and thought of how quickly he’d changed, I felt angry. He had taken hold of time and mastered it, I had let myself be crushed by it. It was only three years, I told myself, only three years – you can make up that time and turn things round for yourself. But I knew I was no longer capable of changing my life. Evolution is a funny thing. For the longest time, you believe in the power of change – in your ability to mould your life through even the smallest acts. Even buying a four-digit lottery ticket feels loaded with optimism, as if those five bucks might turn into a twenty-thousand bonanza and transform your life. Then one day it disappears, that blind devotion to hope, and you know that even if you pray all day, nothing will happen to you. My anger was directed at myself, I didn’t blame Keong. Seeing him reminded me of the person I could no longer be.

      As for the other man, his face remains a blank, even though it should be the one thing I remember from that night. In my defence, it was very dark when I first saw him. What’s more, he turned away from me before I picked up the piece of wood. I couldn’t see his face when I struck him.

       October 6th

      Towards the end of the trial my lawyer tried to explain to the jury the kind of childhood I had experienced. She was young and clever, she worked for free, she wanted to help me. I understood that my life was being used as an excuse for many things. I listened to her speak about me, and though the facts were true, I felt as if she was describing someone else, someone who had grown up close to me, maybe in a village a couple of miles up the coast. Another guy who shared my name, which she kept repeating. Lee Hock Lye. Lee Hock Lye. Always my full name. Sometimes she said, Lee Hock Lye, also known as Jayden Lee, which made the name sound fake, as if I’d made it up – which I had. But still, it was my name – had become my name. I had chosen it when I’d found proper work and things were going well, just before I got married. It sounded good, people liked it – they hadn’t heard anything like it before. It was a cool name that looked professional on the calling cards that I had printed when business started going well. Jayden – that was me, but each time she pronounced the name in front of the entire courtroom it felt as though she was referring to someone else, because she said it as two separate words. Jay, Den. As if she found it unnatural. Every time I heard it, I felt as though the name was being prised away from me, and that I never truly owned it. Also known as. I should never have taken that name, I was foolish to have chosen it.

      The person she talked about was miserable, badly-educated, hopeless. Someone who had no choices in life. Anyone listening would have pitied him. A woman in the jury was nodding her head slowly, her face twisted in a frown. Even I nearly felt sorry for the person being described. But then I thought: Wait, this is wrong. I also thought: I was happy. I was normal. I knew my lawyer was trying to help me, but I wanted her to stop talking. I started humming a tune to block out the noise of her words. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine being back in the village as a child. I tried to remember what it was like to be myself again, but it was ridiculous. That life was gone. What a stupid thing to do, trying to recapture your childhood while you’re being tried for killing someone. Recalling my life wouldn’t make it any more real – the truth of it existed in the version being described by my lawyer. I laughed at my own stupidity. I laughed quite loudly, and couldn’t stop, so I had to put my face in my hands. The lawyer turned around to look at me. She stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and stared at me – the kind of look you give someone when you think he might be having a heart attack but you’re not yet sure what’s happening. The judge said, ‘I don’t think the defendant’s life story is relevant. Please continue with your legal arguments.’ My lawyer tried to dispute this, but my laughing and the judge’s scolding made her lose her concentration; all the intelligence and conviction and vigour I had admired up to that point dissolved in that stuffy courtroom. It was very hot that day, the air-con wasn’t working, I had trouble breathing. She stumbled over her words a couple of times, and couldn’t hold her thoughts together. I was glad it was all going to end soon.

      She got the details wrong. Everyone got the details wrong. Maybe you can set things straight once and for all. Is your phone recording all this? I was born in Bagan Sungai Yu, not in Kuala Selangor town as all the court documents said. The two places are separated by a sharp curve in the Selangor river, and that small distance – forty, fifty feet in places – sometimes felt like an ocean between two continents. These days, with the bridges and good tarmac roads, people think of them as just one place: Kuala Selangor. I get the papers and read articles about new seafood restaurants built on jetties over the water, I see pictures of day-trippers from KL enjoying Sunday lunch, and I think: That’s not Kuala Selangor, that’s my village. But that’s the way things go: the big swallow up the small, everything becomes part of something else. It’s just funny to think that when I was a child, even at primary school, we had to take the ferry over to town, or cycle miles to get around the bend in the river, and when we got to the other side, it felt so busy and important that I thought I was in Tokyo or New York. That map that you’re looking at on your phone, it can’t show you the real distance between our side of the river and town on the other.

      My father was a fisherman, just like my grandfather before him. In fact, every man in the village was a fisherman. The country left us no choice – the river coiled around the village, blocking our route south towards the towns, forever nudging us towards the sea. On the other side were the jungle and the plantations, which offered prospects even worse than the sea. Back then it was Indians who harvested the palm oil, now it’s Bangladeshis and Indonesians – whoever was doing it, we only had to look at their lives to know that their fate was worse than the storms and tides and tangle of nets that we lived with every day.

      All of us worked at the mercy of the elements – the storms, floods, snakes, worms that burrow into your feet. Nature is beautiful when you look at it from afar, or from a car that passes through it with the windows rolled up. When you have to work outdoors it doesn’t seem so beautiful. Yesterday I read an article on Facebook that said: We should all spend more time outside! I looked at the photos of people walking in parks, hugging, drinking water from small bottles, eating slices of watermelon. Lying down on the grass without a mat, without shielding their faces from the sun. Everyone was having fun, no one was sweating or getting heat exhaustion. There were all kinds of people in the photos. Asian, African, every colour under the sun – but they were all behaving like white people. I mean, who else actually enjoys going out into the wilderness apart from these crazy angmoh? You get a day off work, you want to go out into the jungle? Those happy Westerners, they don’t know what ‘outdoors’ is like around here.

      I remember once, when I was thirteen, fourteen – old enough to have started feeling that if I didn’t escape the village I would go mad – I spent a whole day cycling as far as I could, in every direction I could think of. I went inland into the plantations in the shade of the palm-oil trees until the mud tracks got too soft for me to cycle. I looked ahead of me, thinking, How long would I have to cycle before I came out on the other side of the estate? I could only see the perfect rows of trees disappearing into the darkness, so I headed back to the coast, cycling along the dirt path that ran along the rocky shoreline, the red earth staining my toes. All the way to Sekinchan and beyond, that was all I could see: red earth, rocks and mud, the sea stretching back towards Indonesia, so flat and shallow, like a