The Harmony Silk Factory

“That’s a lot of places for a kid like you,” Tiger said. This boy looked perfectly ordinary to him — no distinguishing physical features, nothing unusual in his behaviour. He could have been any one of the young drifters who turned up at the shop from time to time. And yet there was something curious about this particular one, something which, unusually, Tiger could not put his finger on. “Tea?” he said, offering Johnny a chair.

Johnny sat down, his baggy shorts pulling back slightly to reveal hard, gnarled knees crisscrossed with scars.

“Of all the jobs you did,” continued Tiger, “which one did you work at the longest?”

“Yeo’s plantation.”

“Near Taiping?”

“Yes.”

“Yeo’s pineapple plantation, right? The boss is Big-Eye Chew — that one?”

Johnny nodded.

A small smile wrinkled Tiger’s eyes. “Why did you like it?”

“I liked the other workers,” Johnny said, looking at his reddened, dust-covered canvas shoes. “I liked the way they lived. Together. The bosses too.”

“I know that camp well.”

“The workers there were like me. But I couldn’t stay. I had to go.”

“Why?”

“I had done bad things, people said.”

“Sometimes that happens.”

Johnny cleared his throat.

Tiger poured more tea. “What are you good at?”

“Everything,” Johnny said, “except machines.”

Johnny proved to be one of the most diligent employees ever to have worked at the Tiger Brand Trading Company. He began by doing what the other casual workers did — packing, loading, storing, sorting. Backbreaking work. But Johnny was not like the other illiterate workers. He observed and he learned. Soon he knew the names of all the different textiles he handled, and how they were made. He learned to tell the difference between chintz and cretonne, Chinese silk and Thai silk, serge and gabardine. He especially liked the printed patterns of milkmaids and cowsheds on the imitation French cotton made in Singapore. But more than anything, he loved the batik and the gold-woven songket which were delivered to the shop by the old cataract-eyed Malay women who had made them, here in the Valley.

“Put them on the last shelf, over there,” Tiger snorted, pointing to a recess in the farthest corner of the shop, every time a new supply of batik was delivered. “Low-grade rubbish.” Compared to the imported foreign material, it was true that the batik was rough. The dyes were uneven and the patterns, traced out by hand, were never consistent. The colours faded quickly even on the best ones, leaving only a ghostly impression of the original shades. But Johnny liked the irregular patterns. He must have, because later in his life, when he could afford to wear anything he wanted, he would always wear batik for special occasions such as Chinese New Year or Ching Ming. They were his lucky shirts too. He would wear them if one of his horses was running in a big race in Ipoh, and sometimes, if he had to put on a jacket and tie, he would wear a lucky batik shirt under his starched white shirt, even though it made him hot and sweaty. He had red ones, blue ones, and green ones. The blues were my favourite. From far away, when he wasn’t looking, I used to trace the outlines of the patterns with my eyes. Brown dappled shapes stretched like sinews, swimming in the deep pools of the blue background. On his back these shadows danced and shifted quietly — hiding, folding over, tumbling across one another.

In Tiger’s shop, however, batik was considered second-rate, hardly worth selling. You didn’t go to Tiger Tan if you wanted to buy ordinary material made in broken-down sheds in Machang.

“Remember,” Tiger said to his employees, “this is a place where little dreams are sold.”

Before long, Johnny was given more important tasks, such as counting stock and then, finally, serving customers. Tiger gave him two new white shirts to wear when serving in the shop, and Johnny kept them clean and neatly pressed at all times. It turned out he was a natural salesman with an easy style all his own. Like Tiger, Johnny was never loud nor overly persuasive. He pushed hard yet never too far. He cajoled but rarely flattered. Although he always tried to sell the most expensive things in the shop, he knew it was better to sell something cheap than nothing at all. He had a sense for what each customer wanted, and he always made a sale.

The incident with the White Woman, for example, became legendary. Like so many other things in Johnny’s life, this incident seemed to happen without the faintest warning or explanation. Why she should have picked him instead of any other person in the shop no one will ever know. Perhaps there was no reason at all, just one small step on the curious path of fate.