The Harmony Silk Factory

NLY ONE PHOTOGRAPH survives of my mother. In it, she is wearing a light-coloured samfu decorated with butterflies. The dress clings delicately to her figure, slim and strong like the trunk of a frangipani tree. Her hair is adorned with tiny jewels too small for me to identify. When I hold a magnifying glass to the picture, the poor quality of the old paper makes the image blurred and soupy. Her face is young and soft. Sometimes, I stick the photo into the frame of a mirror so that I can see my own face next to hers. My eyes are her eyes, I think. The photo is too old to give me any more clues. I found it when I was fifteen, in an old tin box in Father’s closet, together with the pictures of Tarzan. It was in a cracked leather frame far too big for it, and when I looked carefully I could see that it was because the photo had been carefully torn in half. Two, maybe three other people would have been in it, but only my mother and father remain, sitting close to each other but clearly not touching. They sit at a table at the end of a meal; before them the remains of their feast appear as dark patches on the white tablecloth. Behind them, merely trees. Beyond those, a part of a building — a ruin, perhaps, somewhere I do not recognise. I am certain it is not in the Valley. Throughout the years I have looked at hundreds of books on ruins: houses, palaces, temples, in this country and abroad. Not one resembled the place in the photo. I do not know where it is. Perhaps it does not even exist.

On one side of this incomplete portrait, a hand rests on my mother’s shoulder. It is a man’s hand, of that I am certain. His skin is fair — that too is obvious. On his little finger he wears a ring, probably made of gold. It looks substantial, heavy. Time and time again I looked at the ring through my magnifying glass, but it gave me no clues. It was just a ring.

I took the picture and hid it in my bedroom. Father never mentioned it, and neither did I. I wanted to ask him whether there were any other photographs of my mother, but I never did, because then he would have known that I had stolen the picture. I never dared ask him about my mother; I never knew what questions to ask. Besides, I know he would not have told me about her even if I had. All I have to go on is that single photograph. Whenever I look at it I fold it in half so that Johnny is hidden and I can see only my mother.

FEW YEARS AGO I did something I thought I would never do. I succeeded in visiting the old Soong home, the house my mother and father lived in. I had always known where it was, tucked away a mile or so off the old coast road, west of the River Perak, yet I had never seen it. Partly this is because it is difficult to get to. There are no bridges here, and to get across the river you have to drive a long way south and then double back, travelling slowly northwards along the narrow roads that wind their way through the marshy flatlands. During the latter half of the Occupation, the house was used by the Japanese secret police as their local headquarters. They brought suspected Communists and sympathisers there to be tortured in the same rooms where T.K. and Patti and Snow and Johnny once slept. The cries of those tortured souls cut deep into the walls of the house, and when I was a boy I knew — as all children did — that the place was haunted. In those days I did not know that the house had been Snow and Johnny’s. Back then it was merely one of those things children feared in the same way they feared Kellie’s Castle or the Pontianak, who fed on the blood and souls of lone travellers on the old coast road. We were taught to fear these things and so we did, never once questioning them. We believed in those things as we believed in life itself. When, several years ago, I finally learned of the significance of the house, I simply smiled, as if someone had played a joke on me.

How funny it is that the history of your life can for so long pass unnoticed under your nose.

HEN I SAY I “VISITED” the Soongs’ old home, I am exaggerating slightly. My first attempt to visit the place was not entirely successful. I had planned everything meticulously, but in the end my efforts proved to be fruitless.

I decided to go as a Tupperware salesman. This was the first thought that came into my head, and it seemed a sensible one, as Tupperware was all the rage in the Valley at the time. I purchased a large selection of Tupperware in different colours and sizes and loaded it into my car. I stole a brochure from my dentist’s waiting room and bought a new briefcase into which I packed several “order forms,” which I had typed myself. I put on a tie, of course, and combed my hair differently. I had of course allowed my hair to grow longer than usual, as I thought this would help me to feel like a different person. I gave myself one last look in the rearview mirror of my car before I set off, and I was pleased with what I saw. My own mother would not have recognised me.