We, the Survivors

by Tash Aw

Genres: Asian American

Synopsis

From the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, a compelling depiction of a man's act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux.

Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?

This question leads a young, privileged journalist to Ah Hock's door. While the victim has been mourned and the killer has served time for the crime, Ah Hock's motive remains unclear, even to himself. His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the journalist, herself a local whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race, and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs.

An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Tash Aw's anti-nostalgic tale, We, the Survivors, holds its tension to the very end. In the wake of loss and destruction, hope is among the survivors.

Release date: September 3, 2019

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Print pages: 336

Sample

I

OCTOBER


October 2nd

You want me to talk about life, but all I’ve talked about is failure, as if they’re the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I can’t separate the two – like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. Roots clinging to the outside of the walls, holding the bricks and stone and whatever remains of the paint together, branches pushing through holes in the roof. Sometimes there’s almost nothing left of the roof, if you can even call it that – just fragments of clay tiles or rusty tin propped up by the canopy of leaves. A few miles out of town, on the other side of Kapar headed towards the coast, you’ll find a shophouse with the roots of a jungle fig creeping down the front pillars of the building, the entire structure swallowed up by the tree – the doorway is now just a shadowy space that leads into the heart of a huge tangle of foliage. Where does one end and the other begin? Which one is alive, which is dead? Still, on the ground floor of these houses, there’ll be a business or a shop, some kind of small operation, an old guy who’ll patch up your tyres for twenty bucks. Or a printing press that makes those cheap leaflets advertising closing-down sales at the local mall. Or a cake shop with nothing in the chiller cabinets except for two pieces of kuih lapis that have been there for three weeks. The packets of biscuits on the shelves are covered in the dust that drifts across from the construction sites nearby, where they’re building the new railway or shopping mall or God knows what. These people haven’t made a decent living for twenty years. They’re seventy-five, eighty years old. Still alive, but their business is being taken over by a tree. Imagine that.

That night, after the killing – or the culpable homicide not amounting to murder, as you politely call it – I walked for many hours in the dark. I can’t tell you how long. I tried to hang on to a sense of time, kept looking at the sky for signs of dawn, I even quickened my stride to make each step feel like one full second, like the ticking of that clock on the wall over there, that right now sounds so quick. Tick, tick, tick. But that night each second stretched into a whole minute, each minute felt like a lifetime, and there was nothing I could do to speed things up.

My shirt was wet – not just damp, but properly wet – and it clung to my back like a second skin; only that skin did not belong to me, but to a separate living organism, cold and heavy, weighing me down. As I walked further and further away from what I now come to think of as the scene of the crime (but didn’t then – it was just a darkened spot on the riverbank, indistinguishable from any other), I listened out for the sirens of police cars, expecting to hear them at any moment. I kept thinking, They’re coming for me, this is the end, the mata are going to catch me and throw me in jail forever. I said out loud, You’re finished. This really is the end for you. Hearing my own voice calmed me. Nothing had ever felt so absolute and certain. The police would arrive, they would lock me up, and from then on, all my days would be the same. The thought of being in a small empty cell with nothing to think about for the rest of my life – the idea of this existence comforted me. When I woke up each morning I would see the same four walls that had been there when I fell asleep the night before. Nothing would ever change. What I wore, how long I slept each night, how many times a day I could eat, wash, shit – every decision would be made for me, I would be just the same as everyone else. Someone would take control of my life, and that would be the end of my story. Part of me still wishes things had turned out that way.

I walked through the long grass – it was stringy and sharp and slashed my legs right up to my knees. It was hot, I was wearing shorts, my skin started to sting. Twice, maybe three times, I crossed a bridge and continued to wander along the opposite bank. At first I was looking for my car, but soon I realised I was trying to get as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. The only problem was that I couldn’t remember exactly where it had happened. At some point I started to feel mud between my toes and I realised I’d lost one sandal, which must have got stuck in the swampy ground, so I kicked off the other and walked barefoot. It was late, but not so late that there wasn’t any traffic on the highways beyond, and on the bridges overhead. Their headlamps would sometimes illuminate the tops of the trees above me, and suddenly little details would leap out at me, things I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been walking there in the daytime – kites with smiley bird faces snagged in the branches, or plastic bags, lots of them, hanging like swollen ghostlike fruit.

Sometimes I’d see strange shapes drifting in the middle of the river. Fallen tree trunks and bushes uprooted by the storms upstream, tangled together in huge rafts that looked like some sort of mythical beast from Journey to the West, the kind of nonsense that adults tell children to scare them into behaving themselves, but that no one actually takes seriously, not even children – what kid actually believes in a nine-headed bug? – until one night they’re walking alone on a riverbank, and then those demons seem real and terrifying. Other times, snagged in the reeds right by where I was walking, I’d see a dead creature, a body so bloated that I couldn’t even tell what it was – a could-be cat or a could-be monkey. When a body’s been in the water for that long, its shape starts to blur, softening around the edges until it becomes impossible to distinguish one kind of animal from another.

My arm ached, I was moving in a funny way, one side of my body less mobile than the other. I realised that I was still holding the piece of wood, the length of tree branch that had felt so light in my hand just a short while ago but now seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. During the trial, when people in court referred to the murder weapon that was never retrieved, I remembered the damp two-foot piece of wood that I held that night. It was just a fragment of a tree. A few hours earlier, when I’d struck the man for the first time, the broken length of wood had seemed so insignificant that I thought it incapable of causing pain. I expected it to shatter, I expected the man to laugh at my ridiculous choice of weapon. Now it felt as if I was lifting an entire tree, the weight of the world clinging to its roots. I raised my arm, wanting to throw it far out into the middle of the river, but suddenly I found that I had no strength left in my body. It slipped from my grasp and fell just a few feet away.

I realised after a while that the police were not going to arrive. No one was going to come for me. Not that night, not the following day, and maybe not for weeks. In the end it took them more than two months to arrest me – but you already know that. You also know why it took so long. When the victim is that sort of person, the police don’t really care. Yes, that kind of person. A foreigner. An illegal. Someone with dark skin.

Bangla, Myanmar, Nepal. When the police come it’s all the same to them. Even Africa. It’s as if they all come from one big nameless continent. Back when I was living in Puchong, I saw a group of Africans by the side of the road, a dozen men. Some were sitting on the pavement, others were standing up, laughing, joking, drinking beer and liquor. One or two were dancing – they had a big portable set that played their tunes so loudly I almost couldn’t hear my own music. I was listening to Jacky Cheung on my phone – back then we only had those small Sony Ericssons that made every song sound crackly, as if you were listening to it on the radio in a faraway country. Maybe you’re too young to remember those phones. I was on the other side of the road, outside the 7-Eleven, eating a Ramly burger with Keong. This was seventeen, eighteen, maybe even twenty years ago. Back then you didn’t see so many Africans around. People didn’t know anything about them – which countries they were from, why they’d come here. Ask anyone what they knew about Africa and they’d say, Lions.

Keong was looking at his phone, pretending he wasn’t interested, as if he’d grown up with black people. But he couldn’t help making comments. Wahlau, Muhammad Ali brought all his friends! I remember laughing, even though I didn’t really find it funny. Most probably I made some comments too. It was so long ago, I don’t recall. There was a light breeze that night, I remember that. Next to us an old Indian stallkeeper was clearing up his stand for the night. Business was slow, there weren’t many people out on the street. ‘Every Friday night,’ he said. ‘Every week they come here and raise trouble. Friday supposed to be holy day – these guys, they don’t respect anything.’ In fact he didn’t say these guys, he said these Mat Hitam. Better not translate that.

I said, ‘They’re Nigerian.’ I’d seen an article in the Nanyang Siang Pau about Nigerian students coming to Malaysia, falling into debt after they graduated and being unable to buy a ticket home. I remember thinking, Must be really desperate to come to college here.

‘Shut your mouth,’ Keong said. ‘Nigerian your ass. You don’t know anything.’

As I looked at them, I got the feeling that they were floating through the city, unattached to anything around them. Their music was the only thing that seemed real – a link to their home. That was why they were listening to it so loudly, I thought. But they were thousands of miles away, and something in the way they talked to each other, shouting over the music and laughing in the half-dark street, made me realise that they would probably never return to where they came from. And suddenly I thought, I am just like them, I am floating through life.

‘What the fuck,’ Keong said. There was a note of excitement in his voice. Two guys in the group had started fighting, that kind of messy scuffling that happens when people are drunk, not really a proper fight, just grappling with each other, tumbling into the road. A car passed by and had to swerve to avoid them. The driver leaned on the horn for a long time – it was a Kancil, the noise of the honking as it drove off was high-pitched, like a cheap child’s toy that you buy in the night market. It made us laugh. A few minutes later the men were joking and talking again as though nothing had happened. We stopped looking at them – they were nothing special, they were just like us, just hanging out with friends. Keong was texting his new girlfriend, reading out her messages to me. Of course he was exaggerating. I knew she didn’t think he was the handsomest guy in the world. In fact I’m sure she didn’t even exist. But I went along with it – that’s what you do with old friends. You take an interest in their lives, even when they’re lying.

Then suddenly we heard a commotion – more shouting. We looked up from our phones and saw three police cars and another three unmarked ones surrounding the Nigerian guys. Everyone was yelling. There were a lot of cops, I couldn’t count them. They pushed one guy against a car. I could hear him shouting in English, No drugs no drugs I don’t have anything! But they handcuffed him anyway and made him sit on the kerb just like his dozen or so friends. At first the Nigerians were arguing, shouting at the police. They were big guys, much taller than us, and maybe they thought they could get out of trouble by being loud, but they didn’t know what the police were like. I couldn’t see what happened, there were too many bodies in the way, but all at once everything became quiet, and one of the men was lying on the ground, one arm around his head, the other one stretched out as if he was reaching for something. He wasn’t moving. After a while, some of them started to plead – we could hear them from across the street. Their voices were soft and rich and deepened each time they said the word Please. Please. The sound of the word made me feel as if I was stepping off solid earth and falling into an abyss. I wanted it to stop.

‘Just pay them,’ Keong said. ‘Get all the damn cash out of your pockets. Just pay.’ But we knew they had no money to bribe the cops. I’m sure they understood the system just as well as we did, they just didn’t have the money. Keong shook his head. ‘Aiyo cham lor, lock-up for you tonight my friends.’ When you’ve grown up in the kinds of places that we have, you know what’s in store for you.

A big police truck arrived and picked up all the Nigerians. While it was still parked, one of the cops came over to buy some cigarettes. We asked him what was going on. He said, ‘Local people – we don’t like seeing Mat Hitam around.’ He lit a cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter. ‘We’re like the town council, just cleaning the trash off the streets.’

We laughed loudly – as if we were best buddies with him. Yeah, clean it all up. I can’t remember what else we said, can’t recall exactly what kind of jokes we made, but we wanted the police to think we were on their side. We knew they wouldn’t be hassling us that night, that there was someone else they were more interested in. Even though I was young, I thought I already understood the way things worked. But that night made it clear to me, like the words to a song by a foreign singer. You know the melody by heart, but you can’t quite make out the words, you can only understand fragments of English here and there, you sing a line or two from the chorus and sort of understand the message, but then one day someone explains the words to you, and suddenly everything clicks into focus, the whole song makes sense. It’s no longer just a pretty tune, it’s got meaning – and that night, the message became clear: no one wanted to know about you if you were dark-skinned and foreign. Who would come looking for you if you were thrown in Sungai Buloh jail? Or if you sank slowly to the bottom of a river? No one would ask questions. Not until it was way too late.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I guess I want to empty out the contents of my head after all these years. That’s what you asked me to do right from the start. Don’t hold back, be as honest and open as possible. Just talk, you said. No judgement. So that’s what I’m doing. Just talking.

October 4th

I have nothing to complain about these days. Every day is the same, and this is a blessing. Nowadays people think variety is the only thing that gives meaning to life, but they forget that routine is a privilege too. No disruptions, no crazy ups and downs, no heartbreak or distress – there is something divine in sameness, isn’t there? A gift sent from the gods. I’m lucky. I live on my savings – the small amount of money I made when I sold my house in Taman Bestari that I’d lived in with my wife. To my surprise it was still worth something when I came out of jail, so I sold it and moved into this place, a smaller house with just two small bedrooms, a bit further out of town. Twice a week, someone from the church visits me with a food hamper – basic groceries with a few treats thrown in – and if ever I’m in need, I can always go to church to talk to someone, and they’ll usually give me some biscuits or leftover fried rice – whatever they have in the kitchen. It’s called Harvest Assembly. I’ve been going there for nearly six years, ever since I got out of prison.

Apart from that, small sums of money come through to me from time to time from a Chinese charity. You know, the L-Foundation. That happened through the lawyer who tried to get damages from the prison service for the injury I suffered during my time inside, but of course it didn’t succeed. I could have told them that before they even started. Who in the world ever gets any damages from the police or the prison service? But because of the lawyer’s efforts, someone heard of my case, even though it was never famous, never in the newspapers for long. Somebody took pity on me, even though God knows I wasn’t worthy of sympathy then. Next thing I know, I get a cheque for six hundred ringgit. To you it probably seems like nothing, but for me it’s a lot. I thought it was a one-time deal, I was happy with it, but the cheques continue to arrive – not regularly, just now and then, with no warning or reason. Sometimes 250 ringgit, sometimes four hundred. On those days I’ll walk to the bus stop and ride into town, get there just before the old bak kut teh places shut, and have a big breakfast before strolling around Little India. Sometimes I like to spend a few hours just wandering around a mall in the new town, usually Klang Parade. I treat myself to a meal at Texas Chicken, and always order the same thing: Mexicana Burger and Honey-Butter Biscuits. Sometimes I think I should be more adventurous and try something else – I really like the look of Jalapeno Bombers. Bombers! They sound great. But then I think, what if I don’t like them? The thought of getting something new makes me nervous. I want my day to be happy, I don’t want to be stressed, I want everything to be calm, to remain the same.

I sit and watch the teenagers in school uniforms sharing their fried chicken and showing each other photos on their phones. The boys pretend to be tough, they use the same language I did when I was their age – you know, Cantonese cursing, which sounds really crude and aggressive. If you’d heard me and my friends at that age you’d probably have moved away to the next table. But these kids, they’re not like me – they come from the new suburbs close by, they’ve got decent families. Fourteen, fifteen years old, but they’re just babies, relaxing in the mall together after school and playing games on their phones. Even after a whole day at school their uniforms look freshly laundered, not crumpled and grey with sweat – you’d almost say there was starch on their white shirts. Nothing troubles their lives, and in a strange way, their happiness makes me feel innocent again, and hopeful. Those days out in town are special. I have money in my pocket, I feel independent and free, even if it’s just for a day or two. That’s what those cheques mean to me – a day of freedom. I never pray or even make little idle wishes for them, they just appear. That’s how God works, I guess. Always surprising, always giving.

With the injury I suffered in prison I can’t work. As you can see, I still have a slight limp, though it’s not so noticeable when I’m walking slowly. You only notice it when I have to move quickly, like when I’m running for the bus and just can’t shift my leg the way I want to. My brain says, Faster, faster, and for a few seconds I think I can do it, I really think I can get up and sprint for the bus – but my leg just drags. That’s when I notice that I’m limping badly, my body sloping from side to side. I also can’t pick up heavy loads as I could before. I used to be famous for that. The guys at the factory I worked at when I was a teenager would set me a challenge, see how many crates of fish I could lift at a time, and I’d always surprise them, even though I’m pretty short. It’s my stumpy legs that give me balance. People say it’s a Hokkien trait, that our ancestors needed short thighs and calves to plant rice or harvest tea and whatever else people did in southern China two hundred years ago, but who cares? All I know is that my legs always served me well, until I got to prison. [Pauses.] It’s because of a nerve in my back, something to do with my spine that I don’t really understand. The doctors showed me x-rays, but all I could see was the grey-white shapes of my bones. They couldn’t correct it without surgery in a private hospital in KL, but who can afford that these days? At the hospital I laughed and said, ‘I’m not a cripple, so let’s just live with it, OK?’ Someone from church suggested I could get a different kind of job, something that didn’t involve manual labour, but any kind of job that allows you to sit down in a comfortable office also requires you to have diplomas and certificates and God knows what else these days – and I don’t have any. I was never very successful at school.

One time, just a year after I got out of prison, some fellow churchgoers found me a job in their family business, a trading company that imported goods from China and distributed them throughout the country. I had a nice desk, there was air-con in the office, and I didn’t have to answer the phone or talk to anyone I didn’t know. All I had to do was add up numbers – such an easy job; nothing can be more certain and solid than numbers. I made sure invoices tallied, checked receipts, that sort of thing. Even though I’d never done that kind of work before, I knew about how to manage money. But at that time, I got a bit anxious whenever I encountered anyone new, in a situation that wasn’t familiar to me – I guess it must have been my time in prison that did that to me. Nothing serious, you understand, just some hesitations in replying whenever someone spoke to me, lapses between their questions and my answers that made them think I had mental problems. Five, ten seconds – who knows? I watched people’s expressions change from confusion, to concern, then irritation. Sometimes frustration, sometimes anger. Some people thought I was doing it on purpose. Once a guy in the office said, Lunseehai, such an arrogant bastard! He shouted it out loud right in front of me without expecting a reply, as if everyone thought the same of me, and that I was deaf and mute and couldn’t hear what he was saying. ‘Whatever the case,’ my boss said after a few months – she was very nice, she understood – ‘we think it’s better you stop work. Just go home and rest.’ Up to that point, I hadn’t understood how much I had changed in the previous three years, but losing that job made me appreciate that I had become a different person. Exactly how, I couldn’t tell you, but I was no longer the same. I had a couple of interviews for office jobs after that, but nothing worked out.

That’s why I say I’m lucky. I don’t work, yet I’m alive. My days are calm. I’d even say I was blessed.

[Long silence.]

Sometimes … [Hesitates; reaches for and picks up cup of tea but does not drink.] Sometimes, yes, of course I think of that night. How can I not? I think of the two men who were present, Keong and the Bangladeshi guy. I know what you’re expecting me to say: that I see their faces, and that I’m tortured by the sight of them – but that’s not the way it is. I don’t feel anything about either of them – not hate, not pity. Maybe I should have felt anger towards Keong; maybe things would have turned out differently if he hadn’t come back to see me. He had choices. He didn’t have to ask me to do all those things.

Now when I think about him, I don’t see the Keong of that night. I see the version of him that appeared in court three years later, when my case was being appealed. His white long-sleeved shirt, his neat hair, even the way he spoke to the judge, softly and respectfully – anyone would have thought he was a salesman for an IT company in Petaling Jaya. I didn’t recognise him at first, I thought it was someone else, that the prosecutors had brought the wrong guy to the courtroom. The lawyers asked him questions about himself, and he supplied the bare facts – he owned a business importing frozen dumplings from China, his income stream was steady, he owned a Toyota Camry and had a home loan from Hong Leong bank. He’d recently been on holiday to Australia and was saving up to send his daughter to boarding school there in seven or eight years’ time, when she was old enough to travel on her own. Right now she had just started at a private school in Cheras, close to where he lived, so he could spend a lot of time with her at home. The moment he finished work, he’d rush home to his wife and daughter and they’d spend the evening having dinner, doing the daughter’s homework together and watching a bit of TV. She was a studious girl – she really loved science!

He answered quietly, as if he didn’t want me to hear what he was saying. On the other side of the courtroom I had difficulty making out some of his words. Mortgage. Laptop. Playground. The man speaking seemed to be embarrassed by the way he lived. Why would someone feel shy about having a life like that? That was when I realised it was Keong – the same one I had known since my teenage years, and I knew why he appeared so awkward. He was ashamed because of my shame – or to be more precise, he was ashamed of being happy while my shame was on display to the world. We’d shared so much as children. People used to say, ‘No use giving Ah Hock any ice cream, he’ll just give half to that little bastard Keong.’ But time – that was something we couldn’t share. It could only favour one of us.

And I thought, Of course he’s changed. All those years in prison, when I went through phases of either sleeping all day and all night, or lying awake all day and all night – phases that lasted weeks and broke down my sense of time, my resistance to the idea that every day should be different – during that time, Keong was changing himself. Anyone could have become a new person in that period, anyone could have acquired a brand-new life. He’d been so proud of his hair, the long fringe that he’d dyed a shade of coppery orange when he was fifteen, and that he’d kept right up until that evening when we last saw each other. I used to joke with him. ‘Hey, big brother, going to become father, still keep that gangster hairstyle meh?’ He called it ‘blond’, thought it made him look like a Hong Kong pop star. He always used to do this [sweeps hand theatrically over forehead, throws back his head in slightly camp fashion]. Made me laugh. You’re a nobody, just like the rest of us – that’s what I used to say to him every time he tried to show off.

That hair was gone now, trimmed short and allowed to go back to its natural colour. I hadn’t seen him with black hair since we were teenagers. He’d put on weight, which made him look younger, not older, like an adolescent who’d once been chubby but was starting to shed all his puppy fat and turn into a handsome man. I could tell that he’d given up smoking, that he was eating better – his complexion was smoother, the deep crease between his eyebrows which he’d had since he was a child had disappeared. Ironed out by those three years.

At one point the lawyers started asking him questions about my character. Did he ever know me to be impulsive? Had he ever seen violent tendencies in me? Was I someone who felt sorry and regretted bad deeds? At first he answered clearly and simply, without hesitation, just like the serious businessman he’d become. It wasn’t a role he was performing, it was who he really was now. Both his English and his Malay had improved, and he used them carefully, considering every word before saying it. But as the questions continued, he began to feel at ease and started speaking more freely, sometimes using expressions you might consider rude. He even told a little story from our teenage years. One time hor, I steal biscuit from the store, I share with him but I steal so much we cannot finish, he say must return, must return, I say no way, poke your lung, but he lagi force me so next day we go give back biscuit. Your mother. Make me lose face! But he say how can steal, she also no money.

‘OK, OK, Mr Tan. I think that will do.’ When the lawyer said that I laughed. Even in his new life, Keong couldn’t resist talking too much. For a few seconds, when he was recounting that incident – which I couldn’t recall – I saw the years and the extra weight he’d acquired fall away. I saw the skinny kid with a sharp face and earrings again, the one I’d grown 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-di