Chiak Kantang [1]
By Emilia Ong
Honestly, he helped me a lot. He liked to tell me I was white as fuck, which was useful to know whenever I was having doubts about my identity. Thank god! I would think. Now I know! It was simply one less thing to bother about. In the evenings after he had finished his two hours of exercise I would arrive at his apartment and knock timorously on the wooden door—a large, double-panelled one, like one of those American fridges—and then we would spend the next few hours sitting side by side on his midnight blue suede-effect sofa, listening to a Tony Robbins podcast, or else to the latest from Russell Brand. Everything was resetting, he said. I didn’t not agree with him. As far as I was concerned, humanity’s ends had been tattered for too long, and it was high time they were resolved into something smooth—into something which could be threaded through the eye of a needle and put to use. That was the point about things, I would think, as I levered his penis into my mouth: could you put them to use? It was the question you always had to ask yourself.
We’d met at the supermarket. Not the local one, the fancy one—where all the matsalleh went. You never do say what you’re avoiding, or at what you’re trying to get. Not an immediate attraction perhaps (think Humpty Dumpty x Tom Cruise in the second Top Gun, grinning at you from behind the stack of emerald baskets), but, as he would later take care to remind me, beauty was only skin deep. I may have a few lines but I’m not dead yet! was, to be precise, what he announced when he eventually cornered me. Of course you’re not! I replied, and wondered whether the perfumed air-conditioning had yet snatched up the sweat from my forehead.
I noticed him some time before he spoke to me. There he was, leaning (vigorously-insouciantly) over his trolley’s scarlet handlebars as he wheeled it (nebulously-expressively) a little way behind me. Da yoo think they have celery, he said. His words (western-irreproachable) were loud and had a twang and the interrogative swelled directionless over the crates of dragonfruit beside me like one of those compacted pill-sized travel towels becoming uncompressed. Cavernous syllables landed in the cracks between the watermelons and there they reverberated and there they repeated themselves and they were emitted rather than said.
A soft-skinned employee showed him where the celery was. She physically took him there. Her hair was slick as oil and black as night and every strand terminated in line with the rest. Picking up a knobbly bitter gourd I looked in his direction put the bitter gourd back. Chose rather to fix my gaze upon the attenuated innards of a stack of elaborately-stickered halves of elderly kabocha upon which I subsequently brought it to rest. I suppose you could say there was this aura about him. Whenever I glanced in his direction it reached out and sucked me in, like a white blood cell opening its arms to admit an impurity.
At the other end of the chilled fresh produce section he seized up two acid-green batons of the efficiently sought esculent. Following the grooves of the celery’s tight-lipped striations I found my eyes moving up to the forearm to which they'd been fleetingly attached. It descended with a limber sweeping motion and it rose with an acrobatic elastic motion and its hue was creamy and its girth was thick and in the next moment it (efficiently-effectively) tossed the celery into his trolley.
Soon it was piled high with vivid comestibles swaddled in non-degradable packaging. I saw pairs of crayon-yellow courgettes deep emerald Japanese cucumbers nets of Spanish oranges so perfectly orange they looked like wax. From beneath the flimsy plastic pellicle of a colourless carrier there pressed the tempestuous hide of at least seven avocadoes. Next to them, a stack of raspberries and blueberries, each angled side of their clear hard packaging ruptured with gaps.
When you have money you don’t have to be anywhere.
*
Nothing about him was odd and everything about him was normal. He told me that my basket looked heavy and said to put it down and I did. What I mean is that I dipped my head and let go of the handles and raised up my eyes towards his. The whites of his eyes were large and moist and his grin was gaping and eternal-seeming. Around us, the fancy supermarket deliquesced into something sticky and smooth. It was as if I had passed through the gloopy sclera of his eyeball and was now floating in a substance similar to uncooked albumen. Enfolded in his gaze I felt succinct. He touched me on the arm.
And just where are you from, he said.
*
It was all a bit discombobulating and a little thrilling. For this was me you see!: steeply pushing forty, but with the heart of a seventeen-year-old and still trying to have the body of one. Not a good look. As he continued to speak I thought about all the secret lines, folds, sags and creases hidden beneath my clothes: in recent years the texture of my skin had taken on a texture which could only really be termed ‘crimped.’ The crimping got worse when I had a tan, and worse the more closely I approximated the body of my aspirations. Just then, I was closely approximating it.
Closely approximating a seventeen-year-old’s body made me feel happy, even though I was no fool and knew that said happiness could only be achieved through feeling sad. But that was how the world worked: flowers grew jazz hands when plied with dung, and—whenever I spent an extended period of time on my mother’s island (a place populated by people of diminutive proportions)—I developed a hysterical need to crush the (gorilla-gigantic) matsalleh half of me.
So I was flattered by his attention, yes, if perhaps a tad sceptical at first.
Mumbling something in reply about my mongrel origins I paused. Bit my lip. Knew perhaps even then that it was unwise to harp on about my inner condition of ambiguity, as I usually did. But all he did was nod his head.
Yes, you do sound English, he said.
I supposed that made it official.
Do I? I said.
(What a wonderful way he had of picking out and isolating the key thread.)
(Even when indeed it is not quite what you have said.)
He raised his eyebrows and made a fist, pursing his lips as he lifted the fist towards them. Soo British! he added. He stuck out his pinky like the Queen. I giggled. The giggle tickled my gums and pressed against my teeth and it foamed and it fizzed and then all at once it spilled over the sill of my lips into the spotlit space between us. And then there it was, like thick ocean spume, like the sort of ocean spume that nymphs dance around in. It lapped up against the latticed sides of my recumbent basket and ran its tongue over the heavy-duty polypropylene of the 5kg bag of rice which my mother had charged me to get. A beat passed.
He broke the silence by informing that he had flown to my mother’s island that very day—straight, he said, from Oz. Coffee? he said. He touched me on the arm again. Honestly, it was the most natural thing in the world. I walked out of the fancy supermarket that day feeling advocated for. It was only later that I heard about Daygame.
*
Nothing about him was odd and everything about him was normal. He liked imported fruits and deep red proteins marbled white and leaking blood. Just a bit of broccoli could bloat him up. Breakfast of champions, he would type into WhatsApp in the mornings, beneath a snap of browning avocado or five yellow-eyed fried eggs. When at last I turned on my phone he would send me an eye-roll emoji, followed by the one of two hands clapping. At length I comprehended that the tardy nature of my double-ticks was no matter for laughing. When we met up later in the evenings he would tap me on the knee and remind me that time came for us all. I would soon be as old as him.
I found him to be trustworthy. This was because he told me about all of the bad things he’d done. Well, some of them. On occasion he would hint towards some further, deeper darknesses, but withhold the details. You don’t want to know what I’m capable of, was what he usually said. In return I would say that I myself was no stranger to shadows. But all he ever said back was: There’s no way you're darker than me.
You'd be surprised! I would cry, but he never seemed to hear this. Or maybe he didn’t want to. And who could blame him for that.
*
On our first date he told me he was a military man.
A pilot, no less. Immediately he said this I pictured him in a small room, leaning back into an old swivel chair with his feet on the desk, mirrored sunglasses on his head and a calendar with nude girls pinned to a cork board behind him. But then he said he was staying at the shore front.
Uh, I replied—what shore? I laughed. There’s a lot of shore on this island. He clarified that he meant The ShoreFront, a snarl of luxury condominiums secreted behind a textured slate wall just along from the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. Wow, I said. Fancy! For a moment my mother’s fan-cooled flat with its unpainted concrete stairwell flashed through my mind. I’d seen The ShoreFront only once since the construction had finished, when I was on my way to my cousin’s E&O-hosted wedding to that round-shouldered Eurasian. That afternoon she wore five different outfits, including a cheongsam (nod to her own heritage), and a stomach-baring, peacock-coloured sari (nod to three-eighths of his). Their new couple dance had been choreographed to the beats of Taylor Swift.
For months he’d been working, he said then, ninety-eight-hour weeks. Ninety-eight hours! I exclaimed, obligingly. How do you even sleep? Shrugging his shoulders, he adopted the air of the carefree. Took a swig of his Tiger and swivelled his eyes around the hawker centre I’d thought he’d like to see. Well you always did have this indefatigableness about you. When he released the Tiger he looked at me pointedly.
Outside of those ninety-eight, he said, there remained two for exercise and eight for sleep. He jabbed at a rhombus of lor bak with a stick. I looked at the neoprene foam cooler his beer had been served in. His fingerprints remained embedded in the foam, like little potholes. He added that he had to do those two hours. They were non-negotiable.
Then the rojak arrived. He eyed the plate suspiciously. Upon it there was just visible a mumble of lumpen colour: acid-yellow arrowheads of pineapple boulders of cucumber pink-skinned jambu. Everything was knocking together with slithers of cuttlefish the colour of weak tea, and each element poked discordantly from beneath the edges of a (smothering-encovering) blanket of black sauce. The sauce was sprinkled with white sesame seeds, so that if you blurred your eyes it appeared to be full of tiny holes, like a moth-eaten tarpaulin.
This dish is what they call me here, I said. Mixed up. A mix-up. Muddled.
It sounds uniquely unappetising, he said.
Not really.
Mate, gross, was what he actually said. He nudged a boulder of pearly bangguang with the stick. My mother’s favourite. It had been a long time since I'd eaten with my mother. Instead I had taken to hovering in the doorway to her darkened room while she lay there—ceiling fan going, standing fan going—waiting for her to say something. At those moments, I would feel all of time slip away. I don’t know where you are trying to get to, she would eventually say. But by then I would already be making my excuses, and hastening away.
*
An egg is a meal of dashed possibilities. You have spent your life eating meals prepared by others or possibly by a machine. White armpits, anyone? the matsalleh would say to each other if ever they found themselves in the local supermarket. And everything was full of MSG! It was disgusting. Obscene.
The fancy supermarket was considered safer. There were no wrong aisles in the fancy supermarket. There were no reeking dried goods nothing preserved or fermented no (grumpy-grubby) old women to bark at you if you happened to poke about in the vegetable crates in what they deemed too energetic a fashion. There were no stinking fish, there were no slippery floor tiles; it was a place where matsalleh could take pride in the organic produce which generally made up the bulk of their fancy supermarket transactions.
The moment they entered the fancy supermarket they would breathe visible sighs of relief. The glass doors would slide silently closed behind them, like palm leaves brought ceremoniously together behind a chief. Their shoulders would drop. Their faces would slacken. The patchy claret blooms which had budded across their cheeks would crawl back into their flesh, cosseted within the air-conditioning’s compassion.
*
Eventually I got to spending every night with him. An hour before dawn he would run his pallid hand to and fro across my tummy. Then I would get up and straddle him.
On occasion I could not shake sleep’s lethargy quickly enough. Then he would note that my enthusiasm was lacking. But he wouldn’t be angry. Instead he would be kind enough to finish himself off. Would say gently that all I had to do was to watch.
Afterwards, he would snap off a Dole banana and tell me what was wrong with me.
You like to think you’re mysterious, he would say, but I can read you like a book. Commencing to peel the banana’s yellow hide break the powdery white inner in two he would hand me one half and dutifully I would nibble at it, reasoning that there was no reason to argue. Quite the opposite, in fact: he might be the missing piece in some Tetris-style computer game I had long forgotten I was playing. In which case all I had to do was let him slot the piece in, and all the cracks which had marred my particular dark egg for so long would light up and pulse for a moment, before welding together for the first time, entirely seamlessly. As I thought about this the banana would form a mucilaginous lozenge in my mouth. It never tasted sweet, like the tiny local bananas my mother liked to eat. In fact it tasted of nothing but of boiled, cold potato.
His apartment was a clean and largely colourless affair. Being in it was like being inside a flatscreen TV hanging in the window of a high-end estate agent: there was an irreproachable, aspirational, but not entirely alienating feel to it—a bit like Kate Middleton’s wardrobe. Though I could never feel entirely relaxed in his apartment, equally I never had the feeling that relaxing was completely off the cards. All I needed to do was become as clean and colourless as my surroundings, I thought. Then, perhaps, my presence wouldn’t feel so dimly jarring.
He liked to remind me about the inevitability of war in the region.
But when it comes we’ll be ready, he would say. He would mutter something about the South China Sea and look at me with those blue eyes of his. They never failed to startle me—they were a shade so dramatically diluted that they appeared to have no colour at all. Once I tried to name the colour for myself, but it was hard to name the nearly-but-not-quite translucent. All I could liken it to was the shade they used on the Tetrapak cartons of long-life coconut water he liked to drink.
It’s true that sometimes I could not help myself and, while he was blending up a stiff smoothie (bananas, broccoli and coconut oil), I would return in my whiny way to the theme of my own unbelonging. Insufficiently east, I would cry; insufficiently west! For a while he would indulge me. Then he would push a tall glass of smoothie across the counter.
All this talk about not-belonging was a distraction, he would, after a pause, conclusively say. It was nurture not nature which made us what we were—just look at his own childhood, which had been full of disarray! Then his mother would be mentioned—not without a ripple of tension—and I would notice a long vein begin to play beneath his temples like a whip, or a creature.
I’m deep as fuck, he would say, at the end of the conversation.
And I would nod.
Well, but what else was there to say?
*
Perhaps I should mention that I myself wasn't averse to the fancy supermarket. Each time I went in, I would look at the rows of imported oils at the boxes of maple-syrup granola at the broad array of yoghurts, the range of fat contents so exhaustive that to contemplate them was to slip into a waking sort of coma. Oh, periodically of course I would remember the market the kampong the kueh stall which had formerly occupied the earth upon which the fancy supermarket stood. Then I would feel all sorts of something.
I could not name the something.
So I swallowed the remembering down, and gave thanks for the fact that—the clientele being in general pure-looking and pallid—the management of the fancy supermarket did not feel obliged to hang an enormous television over the entrance, cluttered with a grid of twenty-four CCTV live-action camera views. Asian people trusted white people: perhaps this wasn’t precisely what this particular absence wanted you to know, but it was the message I took away from it. Whenever I went to the fancy supermarket, I would channel all the whiteness I had sloshing about inside me up to the surface. Then—with jars of American peanut butter and packets of Australian cheese secreted into the dark folds of my person—I would slip, smilingly, boldly, out.
When you are white, it is easy to hide in plain sight.
*
Compared to me, he occupied the world convincingly.
Make life work for you, he would say, after his weekday A.M. bowl of frozen berries and stevia. Then I would watch him plunge into The ShoreFront’s infinity pool for his quota of dark, supple laps. There was a sort of frenzy injected into his strength. Was it fury or of frailty?—I could never decide. Either way, I found I wanted to be under his thumb, to do him this kindness, to give him this gift. I wanted to be small, pliant and conquered; to place myself at his mercy; to give him the opportunity to exercise it.
Really, doing so was no trouble at all.
He encouraged me to cast off my shackles. All those hours I spent ensconced in the worlds of my booky-wooks was a waste and a crutch and a screen, he said; even my glasses were a metaphorical partition behind which I was hiding. There are no accidents, he would repeat, before launching into a homily about Jung’s notion of synchronicity, as learned from Jordan Peterson.
I’m in full beast mode, he would say on Sundays, on his way to the gym. Then he would give me one of those looks. It was high time I developed some humility and surrounded myself with mentors, as he did! He would reel off a long list of his own mentors, the relationships with whom struck me as both intimate and unique. They were intimate insofar as he followed every recommendation each mentor made. They were unique insofar as none of these mentors knew he existed.
That’s not to say there weren’t occasions when he would surprise me. Once, for instance, he professed a desire to educate himself in literature. Only the best books, he commanded, in the bookstore, then waited for what I had to say.
The best books? I repeated.
We can learn from old masters, he replied impatiently, before gathering a stack of the chunkiest volumes with the smallest print. When I suggested Crime and Punishment he scheduled an hour each morning to read. I felt hopeful. But by the end of the week, he’d only made it to Chapter Three.
*
He didn’t like the town on my mother's island. Said it was smelly, messy, degraded. I was not offended: when we were seen on the streets together I felt centre-stage. The life of the island would recede into the background, nothing but a host for him and me. We would bypass the machete-wielding vendors of fresh coconuts papayas watermelons cempedek nangka and he would bemoan the difficulty of getting anything pure on this island—anything clean, sugarless, carb-free. Palm oil was to be suspected. Tropical fruits were to be feared. Thus it was that we took long detours to the fancy supermarket on a nearly daily basis. There, he would buy bags of dehydrated kale snacks, coconut flour cookies, and purple potato crisps. The crisps were packed in matte foil that was meant to resemble brown paper bags.
He considered himself a disruptor. Liked to kiss me in public, even though it was not the done thing on my mother's island. Fishermen sniggered. Housewives sneered. I knew they thought I was a hussy. I decided not to care.
I didn’t care. Any embarrassment I might once have felt for failing to adhere to the specific social mores of my mother’s island had long ago deserted me. My days of trying to pass as a local were over. And so, wherever we were, when he opened his bloated arms towards me, I would sink towards his inflated chest. The sleeves of his t-shirt would tug themselves back towards his shoulders, baring a strip of profoundly white skin. Whenever I saw that strip it made me feel like certain things could be absolute after all: firmly absolute, and absolutely cleansing.
The point of life was to have a good death, he liked to say. Most people were zombies—whereas he, he was hardcore. People were full of bullshit, he would add. And they loved nothing better than rolling around in it.
Do you love rolling around in shit? he would say.
When I did not answer he would say that all my worries about not-belonging were devices conjured by my monkey mind in order to obscure having to answer this ultimate question. But not to worry! He would help me get out of my shit. He would help me purify it. I might be gunk now, he said, but I was about to be transformed into a butterfly.
Level up, he said.
The world felt simple and clean. I promised him that I would.
*
On Saturdays we liked to go to the revolving rooftop bar. This was a place which served drinks and edibles of a western-resembling, locally-twisted variety to a largely matsalleh clientele. On the cocktail list, therefore, were a ‘muddled’ palm toddy and cili padi margaritas; there were tom yum pizzas, banana blossom kebabs, and a spaghetti carbonara made with curry leaves and salted egg. Sometimes when we sat on the high stools at the high tables, looking out at the blackness of the island below, I would think about my mother in her flat, soaking her fungus, sucking her chicken feet, and re-using her bags of kopi o. Then I would get the odd sensation that I was running out. I put the thought out of my mind.
It was at this bar that we made our matsalleh friends. The women wore floral blouses, long Indian skirts and pearlescent leather sandals with rhinestones; the men were beer-bellied, salt-haired, and clothed themselves in khaki, pink, and cream.
They would speak frequently about how the island had changed their lives.
At first he looked a little sceptical, but did not disagree.
It was such a special place! they said. Amazing food! And so friendly!
One night, a wife stood on her chair and bellowed.
I am Malaysian lah! she said. She jabbed at the air. Then she told the others that she really felt that here, on my mother’s island, she had found her homeland. It’s where my soul’s meant to be, she added. Around her they all nodded, seriously.
I don’t know how to talk to these people, I whispered to him later that night.
Don’t put yourself down, he said.
*
And then the rains came.
And then the rains came, and the stickiness, and that night when all the ants grow wings and clog up elevators and foyers and kitchens, and everything was lively and everything was growing, and everything was being born or it was demanding to be. And I went every day to the fancy supermarket while he was at the gym, and in the fancy supermarket my intentions were not doubted, and my interactions with the employees in the fancy supermarket took on the cadences, I thought, of those shared between friends.
Ini? the younger boys would sometimes say to me, as I lurked amid the watermelons. They would hold up a gargantuan specimen.
So big ah! I would cry. The employees would laugh. Then I would take up a medium-sized melon and put it in my bag. I would walk out without stopping, and go back to his apartment by e-hailing a Grab.
*
The matsallehs started to invite us to places: to Thursday’s Pinot & Piano evening, to Friday’s Jazz-In, to Saturday’s Pop n’ Bop. One evening a wife issued an invitation to an Aperitivity—a night which contained no apparent activity, only three rounds of drinks, plus a complimentary Pimms. ‘Because,’ said the menu, ‘it’s always Wimbledon somewhere.’
Most of these evenings took place in the heritage watering holes which had come to crowd the conservation area of my mother's island—meaning that they took place in pretty, gutted shophouses from which the former residents had been forcibly removed.
Over glasses of wine the matsalleh moaned about these exiled inhabitants’ cavalier approach to their own heritage. Then they congratulated the new matsalleh owner on his dedication to saving it. If it hadn’t been for him, they would say. Because left to their own devices, they sighed—these locals! They would let their precious culture just slip away.
We began to visit the matsallehs’ homes: they tended to be charming colonial-era residences laid with Persian rugs and hung with wooden carvings of the Buddha’s eyelid. One hostess informed us that her main hobby was Collectibles. She laid a photography book prominently out on the coffee table. It had the words ‘Malaysian Moods’ printed on the cover, but when I turned to the back page, I saw a man who resembled Jacob Rees-Mogg staring back at me from the black-and-white author photo.
*
It was not long after this that he began to profess to being keen to invest in hard realities. He started listening to The Meaning of Money podcast and, after considering whisky and art, settled on antiques. On Chulia Street, a guy with blonde dreadlocks told him that the Thieves Market at Lorong Kulit was the only Real place to go. He invited me once. Then he disinvited me.
Apparently I shopped like I swam.
And so, in a few weeks, the apartment filled up with masks and teapots and enamel-glazed tiffins.
He bought a Fjällräven bag. Non-aviator Ray-Bans. Now, whenever I expressed a desire to know what he wished to do any given evening, he would say: Anything can lah! He dragged me along to bars frequented by grubby backpackers; there, he would sit at their tables and give them insider’s tips about the island. One night, after introducing himself to two Gisele Bündchen-types wearing crop tops and fisherman pants, I heard him say: I am Malaysian.
That evening, I declined to go home with him. Instead I went to the fancy supermarket. I filled my bag with cranberry-yoghurt granola and with coconut-honey yoghurt and with Mars bars and with Dairy Milks and with chunky Kit Kats and with packets of jalapeno Jack cheese. So when I heard the Hello? and felt the hand on my bicep, I can’t say I was surprised.
I was not surprised. Not exactly.
But nor was I not not-surprised by the strength of the grip and by the grip of the strength of the hand which (suddenly-sharply) fastened me.
*
It rained all that night outside my mother’s local police station. After several hours, while I was staring at the gilt-framed photograph of Najib, the officers began to eat the evidence. They ripped through the slippery dark cellophane of the Mars bars and laughed, while demanding an explanation. They simply couldn’t comprehend such behaviour in someone like me: someone from a foreign, rich, upstanding nation.
Of course I could not explain. And so I looked towards the window. But, in the wet, blackened glass, all I could see was my own face.
I peered back at it. And it peered back at me—with eyes which were large, black and biddable, and set deep within an expanse of pale, potato-like skin.
Endnotes
[1] (Not that I ever said this. Not that I ever used this phrase. Though I loved to pretend I had some intimate connection with my mother’s language, realistically all I was ever able to retain were the insults. I suppose you could say that this one in particular was easy to remember. After all, had my father’s blood not rendered me one of the very potato-eaters it referred to?)
Emilia Ong is a British-Chinese Malaysian writer living in the UK. Her work has been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, longlisted for the Laura Kinsella Fellowship, and shortlisted for the Morley Prize. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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