Resurrection

Hwee Hwee Tan

HE SAT by the green river reading Ernest Hemingway, his stomach burning.

Fifteen years ago, refuse from the Clarke Quay hawker center had bobbed along the river—plastic cups, straws, half-eaten noodles, Coke cans, the Straits Times, the Yellow Pages, oil-stained food wrappers—but today the river was as clean and green as the rest of Singapore. The threat of five-hundred dollar fines and community service—an afternoon spent picking up rubbish at the beach in a fluorescent yellow vest—deterred potential litterbugs. A wooden dinghy floated under the bridge. Beneath its brown canopy, a wizened sailor sat tapping his dark fingers against the tires on the side of the boat. On the edge of the harbor, the Merlion, a white statue with the body of a mermaid and the head of a lion, roared clear water into the blue sea. Cars crossed the bridge, boiling up gray clouds of dust and fumes. Cheong closed his book, A Farewell to Arms, and wiped his sweaty palm on the bridge rail.

Frederick Henry was so Singaporean—always eating in a crisis. Henry had been blown up by the Austrians while eating cheese. When he found out his wife was dying, the first thing he did was go to the cafe for a beer and some ham and eggs.

Cheong was the same. He ate his way through seasons of stress. When he was doing National Service in the army, his mother stuffed him with ginseng tea, bird’s nest, and black medicinal chicken soup with red dates that tasted like diluted charcoal. Cheong’s American friends never ate when they were stressed. Instead, they suffered from indigestion. Frederick Henry may have been white, Cheong concluded, but he was a Singaporean at heart.

A screech woke Cheong from his meditation. Two men in long red robes were fighting on a stage. It was a wayang, a Chinese opera performed to entertain the spirits during the Hungry Ghost Festival. Songs were wailed; women danced, their long pink sleeves trailing behind them. Battles were fought with swords, spears, and acrobatic flips, all to the clanging of gongs and cymbals. During the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival the ghosts were released from hell to roam the earth. Women squatted by the roadside, burning ghost money in biscuit tins for their dearly departed to spend.

From the river, Cheong could see the Westin Stamford, the tallest hotel in the world. The other skyscrapers towered above the green waters, white light bouncing off dark windows, a labyrinth of mirrored citadels, a city of glass. Singapore was the center of information technology in South-East Asia, yet still a place where people bowed down to idols, burned joss sticks, consulted mediums, exorcised demons, and walked on coals.

By the river, an old woman stared at the black ash as the ghost money burned. Cheong looked away from her and read Hemingway.

In Singapore, there were two types of people, the Westernized gei ang-mo, or “fake redheads,” and the Chinesy, who were not Westernized at all. Cheong’s mother-in-law was of the Chinesy type. Even in front of Cheong, she had often said to her daughter, “I don’t know why you married such a banana. Yellow outside, white inside.”

Cheong had wanted a Christian funeral service for his wife; his mother-in-law, a Taoist one. He suggested that they have two different services, since he figured all people grieved in their own ways. The church service was a simple affair. People arrived at three, dressed in black. There were two hymns, a short sermon, and everyone left at four. It was too quiet for his mother-in-law.

She put on a Chinese funeral wake with the full works. She hired the hall in the community center and filled it with gray-robed monks who clanged their gongs and wailed the whole night through, making as much noise as possible in order to scare away the demons, and waking up the whole neighborhood. The hall was decked with flowers and streamers, which reminded Cheong of their wedding. As the widower, he was required to chor ye, so he sat up in the hall all night, doing nothing. As with many Chinese customs, he did this without understanding the reason for it. He wore white. Though the Sarsi looked and tasted like drain water, he drank glass after glass. His wife’s female relatives played mahjong, while the male relatives played gin rummy. The monks looked bored and yawned loudly between wails. At three in the morning, Cheong took an aspirin. The gongs and the incense gave him a headache.

In the morning, his mother-in-law insisted that he walk the ten miles to the graveyard behind the funeral truck. The coffin was in the truck, and so were the monks, who clanged and drummed their way from the community center to the graveyard. It was hot outside, forty degrees Celsius, and there wasn’t a single cloud in the white sky. He had a fever that evening.

He wiped the gravy from the casserole dish with a crust of bread, attacking the brown liquid that streaked its pale surface. The dish would have to be soaked overnight and scrubbed until it shone. Tomorrow, any uneaten portion would be a stain of ingratitude toward the cook who, full of pity, had provided the food so freely. On the doorstep would be another casserole. He would replace the full casserole dish with the clean one.

When would the dishes stop appearing? When would his mother-in-law decide that his period of mourning was over, that sufficient time had passed, that he might have mastered the rudiments of cookery, that she had fulfilled her contribution to the last rites?

He was sick of chewing on her condolences.

He went to return his mother-in-law’s casserole dish.

Her flat was decorated according to the principles of feng shui, Chinese geomancy, everything arranged to harmonize the cosmic breath, to ward off evil spirits, and to attract fortune. Feng shui meant “wind and water,” balance, yin and yang.

Red, the fire of the Five Elements, brought fortune. The front of his mother-in-law’s flat suffered from a red overdose—the red door was draped with red banners and red flags. The eight trigrams, which looked like a spider’s web, were everywhere, printed on the banners and flags, and framing the mirror on the door, which deflected bad luck and malevolent spirits.

Next to the door was a red altar. Beneath his rectangular golden hat, the idol’s face was deeply flushed, and a long, black beard rested on his pot belly. He was flanked by two oval red light bulbs and fronted by three short, thin joss-sticks.

On the side of the door were green porcelain fragments forming the words loong yin, azure dragon, and hu xiao, tiger roars, the dragon on the east, the white tiger on the west. Both creatures scared away evil spirits.

He knocked. The door’s upper panel was cobalt blue, the color of Heaven.

His mother-in-law opened it.

“Thank you for the food,” he said. “You really don’t have to cook for me anymore. I can manage.”

“I know you can,” she said. She did not say anything for a long time. She looked at the idol. Then she said, “You never grieved for her.”

He was silent. His hands trembled.

“You never grieved for her. You never did a thing for her. You don’t even visit her grave. I went to her grave yesterday—so dusty. I had to wipe the dirt off the stone. See, I still have the cloth.” She showed him the gray, dust-darkened cloth. “You like that to your wife, your next life, you come back as a cockroach.”

He clenched his jaw so tightly it hurt. He would say nothing.

“Ha,” she said. She waved the dirty cloth in his face. “All you do is sit by the river all day, reading. You never even go to her grave, never burn joss sticks, never pray to her. You never grieved for her.”

At the office Christmas party, he went to the tables of food. Chocolate truffles had been rolled in powdered almonds and ginger and vanilla dust. Spiced baked hams were crowded against turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. Twelve varieties of cheeses were piled beside grapes lying on chicken breasts. There were devilled eggs, green pate, and homemade cheesecakes topped with strawberries and cream. The Italian cheese curled around the dark Christmas pudding. The bar served red wine, purple liquors and blue cordials. His stomach burned, and he missed her.

He went to church. He took the body and blood of Christ. The wafer stuck to the roof of his mouth and wouldn’t melt. It stuck as he sipped the red wine, and as he returned to the pew, it stuck still. The wine was sweet, but his stomach burned, and he missed her.

In the evening, he had two cups of Christmas coffee laced with chocolate and almonds. Whenever he drank too much caffeine, his heart pounded, his belly churned, and he couldn’t sleep. On Christmas night, watching Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, he drank mugs of strawberry tea, hot chocolate, Kenyan coffee, and even three glasses of diet Coke. Too much caffeine, his stomach burned, and he missed her.

Whether the roads were black with rain or streets white with sunlight, his stomach burned, and he missed her.

That was why he always went to the river. Hemingway understood about grief and food, about mourning through food. But how could he explain that to his mother-in-law—about Frederick Henry, ham and eggs, and his wife? She did not understand that nothing could be done once someone had crossed the line of death, that all rituals were useless, that all that loud clanging and wailing would never wake the dead. All that was left to do was to switch off the light and to walk back to the hotel in the rain. You never grieved for her. She wouldn’t understand, but Hemingway understood. Whenever Cheong’s stomach burned, he would go to the green river to read.

You never did anything.

He never burned any joss sticks, never burned ghost money for his wife to spend, never cooked fried rice to offer at her grave. He didn’t believe that any of it could reach her. His mother-in-law told him to pin a square cloth patch on his shirt for at least a month, a Taoist custom, but he didn’t want to wear his grief on his sleeve. She accused him of betraying his race, his essence, by acting like a gei ang-mo.

But his wife was gone and there was nothing he could do. His life was one big doing nothing.

Rain-soaked shoes dripped on the coffee table, while mugs held socks on the staircase. The lights were left burning in the midday, the toothpaste was squeezed in the middle, and the keys were left in the car. His CD lay on the dust-balled carpet, while her rain-swollen novel sat on the garden chair.

He stared at the blank paper. She used to pass his desk at this time, and he would have trouble keeping his eyes off her. No single element of her face had been remarkable, but the total was fascinating. He would say something absurd, just to see her respond, the movement of her eyes, her gestures. He wanted to see her laugh.

She would smile and say, “Get back to your work. Deadline. Deadline.” She would kiss him on the lips, then push his face toward the typewriter.

She would pick up his CD off the carpet, shake her head, and say, “I’ll be reading in the garden.”

If only he could write something, black on white, some words to crack the icy surface of the page, anything to break the paleness like her paleness when she stretched there on the table and he asked the doctors to leave him alone. He had shut the door, but it was no consolation. He knew she was lying there haemorrhaged, a bloodied shrine, defiled and hideous, the baby black, the cord wrapped around his neck, choked.

He went to the river to read. As usual, he would open the Bible. The dead in Christ will rise first, he read. Nobody understood why he read, but the words were all he had, the dead in Christ will rise first, and he clung to them like Jesus in the wilderness. In his hunger and thirst, those words were bread from God; in a waste where all food tasted like stones and thorns, those words fed him hope. He sucked on every phrase, let it melt on his tongue, and felt the glow in his heart. One day he would see her again.

He shut his eyes and drifted again into that same repeating dream.

He saw the coffin she lay in, heavily draped. It had twelve escutcheons, and twelve locks with twelve different keys.

He sought those keys, crossed the wastes of sea, made runes in the rainless sands.

Finally, he came upon the black beach. There, on the dark water, the dead lake, was the black-browed boatman, the guide of shadows, his cold pale hand at the oar.

Cheong boarded the boat. The oarsman toiled, bending his body, climbing through the night and the water, beating the oar until they reached the other side.

There, on the dark sand, she stood, all in white, washed of the birth blood, pure. She opened her arms to embrace him.

Her voice echoed like an angel dissolving in the air, like a shapeless flame.

He woke, and the echoes became mere echoes, sound shaking dust in empty spaces. He woke to absences, to air without angels.

Visit Hwee Wee Tan as Image Artist of the Month for August '01

Issue #28 • Fall 2000