A Very Safe Place
Shawn and his father found the man on the easternmost coast of their island shortly after dusk, when the sky was drained of almost all its orange light and the waves had grown dark, topped with an eerie froth. There was no moon that evening, a detail, Shawn’s mother would later say, when arguing with his father about whether the man was dangerous or not, that was clearly not a coincidence, and showed careful consideration and connivance on his part.
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
It was impossible to imagine this man, prone and shirtless on the wet sand, to be threatening in
any way. His eyes were closed; the skin was tight over his sharp ribs. If it weren’t for the shallow, quick breaths that came from his lips, an onlooker might have presumed him dead.
“Pa?” Shawn ventured.
He stood slightly behind Chee Meng, at a distance from the prone man. Though barely nine, he knew that the scene before him was wrong, and he was afraid.
His father did not reply but squatted down to examine the man.
“Should we call police?” Shawn asked.
He said this with no sense of any crime having been committed. The police, after all, were called for all manner of disruptions in daily life. A stray dog making a ruckus at the void deck—call police. A neighbor setting up an unauthorized water feature in the common corridor—call police. A group of teen-agers playing loud music at a taxi stand—call police. The police, in Shawn’s mind, were much like the class monitors at school, charged with resolving any bothersome or unusual situation.
But no sooner did the words leave his mouth than the man’s eyelids fluttered open.
“No . . . police,” he said, in what was scarcely more than a whisper.
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Listen to Rachel Heng read “A Very Safe Place.”
“Are you O.K.? Sick is it? Need ambulance?” Chee Meng said.
“No . . . police.”
“No lah, call police for what. But why you lie here like that?”
There was no one else around, it being so late in the day. This part of the coast was typically deserted, except for the slim concrete jetty they had come from, which was popular among fishing enthusiasts like Shawn’s father. Glancing back to the jetty now, they saw that it, too, was empty. They had stayed late to fix a reel that kept sticking, fiddling with it obsessively until the sun went down.
“No police.”
It was all the man would say, over and over.
“Where you live?” Chee Meng asked. “Want me to call your wife? Parents? Anyone?”
The man was silent. He looked, Shawn thought, terribly sad.
“Help,” the man said. “You help. Home.”
“Yes, your home is where?”
The man shook his head. “No. You help. You home.”
It was the most he had spoken. Shawn realized that the man did not sound like anyone he had met. For the first time, he noticed the man’s unusual haircut, curly and long in the back. The man looked Chinese, like them, but his features were slightly different, unfamiliar in some way—though Shawn would not have been able to say how.
The man coughed. “Help,” he said. “Help.”
Shawn’s father looked around with a furtive air. Already Shawn knew what he would do. Other people’s problems, he could hear his mother say. The issue was his father’s tendency to get mixed up in them. There was the elderly neighbor’s sickly cat, which he’d taken in, though it needed expensive prescription food—a source of constant fights between Shawn’s parents at the end of each month. The various loans Chee Meng handed out to relatives and friends, even to a woman selling tissue packets at the hawker center, because she’d said that she was a single mother with three young children. “They take advantage of you,” Shawn’s mother said every time. “They know they can take advantage of you, and so they do.”
But those were small things compared to this. A man, a stranger, an entire person who did not want them to call the police.
“Come,” Shawn’s father said, handing the fishing rods and buckets to him. “Carry this. I carry him.”
They could walk only very slowly, the man being so weak, and Shawn struggling to carry all the equipment. He tried to keep the ends of the fishing rods from dragging on the cement walkway—something his father often told him off for, since it wore the rods out—but could not manage while holding so much at once. His father did not notice. He was focussed on the man, encouraging him in a gentle voice to put one foot in front of the other.
Perhaps someone would stop them, Shawn thought guiltily, as they made their way to the car. Perhaps a policeman would be lingering in his cruiser at the parking lot, as they sometimes did, and would step in firmly, tell Chee Meng that it was very kind of him to help, but the authorities would handle the matter of the strange man from there on, and his father would be forced to listen.
But the parking lot was empty. It was almost dark now, the trees sending their long shadows across the asphalt.
They drove home in silence, the man slumped in their back seat, fishing rods clattering in the trunk. Shawn made a mental list of all the things the man could be. A criminal. A gangster. An illegal immigrant. From a young age, he’d had it drummed into him that the world was a dangerous place, and Singapore a safe bubble amid the chaos. Nowhere else in the world, after all, could a woman walk on the street in the middle of the night with no fear for her safety. Shawn’s mother was proud of saying this. But this safety was hard-won, achieved only as a result of unfailing vigilance, as everyone was continually reminded. A cardboard cutout of a policeman with his neat blue cap stood at the exit of the multistory car park by Shawn’s home, a finger pointed sternly. “Have you locked your car?” the sign said. “It only takes a moment of carelessness to be a victim of THEFT. Low crime does not mean NO crime.”
Back home, Chee Meng parked the car, and he and Shawn walked past the policeman’s cardboard finger with the stranger propped up between them. Shawn avoided the figure’s gaze. At the void deck was a group of old men gathered around a stone table, bottles of beer open before them. Their raucous conversation quieted as the odd trio approached. Shawn felt the old men’s eyes on them the whole time as they stood waiting for the elevator, the stranger leaning weakly against his father’s shoulder. No doubt they were an unusual sight in the neighborhood, which was a typical H.D.B. estate, with its aunties and uncles, children in school uniforms toting enormous backpacks, construction workers lounging by scaffolding—an estate where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. Painfully aware of this, Shawn waited for one of the drunk old men to comment, heckle, make one of those incomprehensible jokes that drew rude laughter from adults. Anything at all.
But the men remained silent. The elevator arrived, and Shawn, his father, and the stranger piled in. For one long, awkward moment, Shawn found himself facing the curious, staring faces of the old men, until at last the doors closed and the three of them were whisked upward.
“Finally,” his mother said when they opened the front door. The welcome in her voice evaporated as she caught sight of the man. “What are you doing? What is this?”
“Found him on the beach,” Chee Meng said, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say, a perfectly normal thing to do.
“What?”
That simple word filled Shawn with despair. What, indeed? What did his father hope would come of this?
Shawn felt something rough and warm against his leg. It was the cat, pressing its patchy face against him. He saw his mother looking at it. Her eyes glittered dangerously. In a fit of helpless anger, he flung his leg out against the animal, which yowled pitifully and dashed away.
“Shawn!” Chee Meng shouted.
Shawn stared at his father miserably. He had not meant to kick the cat. And now his despair gave way to shame that he could not be more like his father, generous and kind.
Chee Meng turned back to his wife. “He needs help,” he said, gesturing to the man. “I thought he can stay with us for a while.”
“Stay? Help what? Who is he?”
Shawn turned to look at the man, half expecting him to answer. But the man simply stood there with a dazed expression on his face, swaying gently in the living room of their small, cramped flat, like a lone tree in the breeze.
The following weekend, as usual, Shawn went with his father to the jetty where the fishing enthusiasts gathered. Perched like seabirds on wobbly plastic stools, leathery and liver-spotted from hours in the sun, some smoked while others sipped packets of bandung or chrysanthemum tea. Each glanced from time to time at their rods, propped against the metal barrier that separated land from sea.
“You got hear? Last night Coast Guard catch three new ones.”
This was met with a silence that was filled by the quiet wash of surf and distant shrieks of children playing on the beach.
“Three more! Tried to swim with empty garbage bags, use as float. Tell you already, gahmen don’t want to say, but every day getting worse.”
The man who spoke was middle-aged and unremarkable in appearance, fond of slapping the singlet-clad flesh of his stomach with relish, declaring that if you spent all day and night sitting in the driver’s seat of a taxi for decades on end, you would also grow a belly as impressive as his. The men at the jetty knew him as Ah Gau, a veteran hobbyist whose knowledge of tides and techniques was as overbearing as it was extensive. Holding the record for the largest stingray ever caught—a shocking two metres—was nothing to sniff at, and for all his lecturing on how there was no luck in fishing, only skill, etc., he was respected by the men nonetheless. Of late, however, Ah Gau had given up his old refrain for a new one.
“Bring so many P.R.C.s, Filipinos, what they expect? Don’t even need say the rest—foreign talent, right? So many come legally, but then their brother, friend, uncle, whatever, hear how much money they make here, also want to come, then how?”
He needed no response to continue. “Tell you, these foreigners, anything also try. Hide in back of lorry, never mind, nowadays, so many even try to swim. They think, hide under causeway, come at night, no one will see, hah! Please lah. Think our Coast Guard stupid? And then they get caught.” Here he let out a laugh, ugly and self-satisfied. “Then what? Then rotan!”
At this, Shawn, who sat with his father at the end of the jetty, piped up. “Uncle, what is rotan?”
Chee Meng shushed him. “Adults talking, don’t ask so much.”
“No, no, O.K. what, Shawn is a big boy, right? Can understand already, right?” Ah Gau stood up from his chair. He took up an athletic stance, legs wide apart, arms flexed and raised as if gripping some invisible stick. “Rotan means—” He brought the stick down. “Whppsh!” Cackling, he did it again. “Whppsh!”
Some of the men chuckled along. Others tsked in impatience. “Ah Gau, talk so much, no wonder all the fish swim away,” one of them said.
“Anyway,” someone else chimed in. “Those who swim here are not P.R.C.s. They come from nearby. Indonesia, Malaysia, even Myanmar.”
Shawn noticed his father nervously tapping his foot against the ground. Just then, Chee Meng’s fishing rod twitched, and the line began to run out. He jumped up and grabbed it, Shawn yelping in excitement. The line tightened, and Chee Meng started to reel it in, but, after a few seconds, it fell slack.
“Too bad. Next time, next time!” Ah Gau said.
Chee Meng did not respond. He set his fishing rod down and began gathering their things.
“Go home already, Pa?” Shawn asked. “So fast?”
“Ya, so fast, Chee Meng? Cast again lah.”
But Chee Meng had already packed up. “Come,” he said brusquely.
Shawn didn’t move. “Don’t want.”
“What’s wrong with you, boy? Faster, go.”
“Don’t want to go home. Don’t want!” Shawn bit his lip so as not to cry.
The curtness in his father’s voice was replaced by a syrupy, coaxing tone. “Come. Ma cook your favorite fried chicken tonight.”
“But he—” Shawn stopped short, silenced by a sharp look from his father.
He. That was how they referred to the stranger, since they still did not know his name, though he had been in their flat for two weeks now. He had not said much more than when he arrived, though he was very much recovered, spending most of his time in Shawn’s bedroom. Shawn slept on a thin mattress on the floor of his parents’ room, lying awake each night to their furious whispers, long after the lights had been turned out. From those whispers, Shawn had gathered that his parents thought the man to be Burmese, one of the very men that his father’s fishing buddies had spoken of, who braved the seas to make their way to Singapore’s shores in search of safety or fortune or who knew what. The Coast Guard, as efficient as any official apparatus in their country, usually picked them up immediately. But somehow, against all odds, this man had made it.
Often, Shawn would stand in the doorway of his bedroom and watch the stranger eat off a tray balanced on his lap, arranging each mouthful of food on his spoon with great deliberation before bringing it to his mouth. Then he would chew slowly, sometimes even closing his eyes, as if the hard, undercooked rice and watery vegetables were the best things he’d ever tasted, when Shawn knew his mother’s cooking to be flavorless.
“Don’t want to go home,” he repeated to his father now.
“That’s enough. Let’s go.” Chee Meng grabbed the boy’s wrist.
A chorus of grunts and goodbyes arose from the other men. Shawn turned to look at them, wishing he could stay there in the bright sea air, as his father marched him down the jetty.
For days afterward, Shawn went around the playground going “Whppsh! Whppsh!” Often, he accompanied the sound with the same movement he’d seen Ah Gau make—legs wide apart, arms flexed overhead, brow furrowed in concentration.
Somehow, he knew not to do it at home or in front of his parents, sensing that this new game held some ugly truth, mysterious and forbidden. He asked a teacher at school, hesitantly, what crimes might merit caning. She was his English teacher, a plump woman with round, plastic-rimmed glasses, who gave off an air of being sweetly disappointed. Aside from his mother, she was the person in the world whom Shawn most wanted to please. And so he was glad when the teacher nodded earnestly, as if this were a good question, one that showed Shawn to be a thoughtful and serious student.
“Most violent crimes,” Ms. Chong said. “Assault, kidnapping, murder. Also, drugs.”
He thought for a moment. “And . . . is it very painful?”
An odd look flickered over Ms. Chong’s face. She paused, then gave a nod so slight he could easily have missed it.
Still, he pressed on. “What about illegal immigration?”
He had heard the phrase recently on the news. He had heard it many times before, he realized, but never paused to understand what it meant.
“Yes,” she said. “Almost certainly.”
He was silent. Rotan, the boy thought, just as Ah Gau had said. That would be the stranger’s fate, should he be turned out of their home and caught.
“Is everything O.K., Shawn? Where did you hear about this?”
“On TV,” he said quickly. “There was a news program about it.”
“I see.”
“They come with drugs and guns, right?”
She didn’t answer but studied him closely. “It can be frightening to hear about such things,” she said at last. “But it’s nothing for children to worry about. Singapore is a very safe place.”
He wanted to tell her that it was something to worry about, that one moment life could be perfectly ordinary and the next a strange man could be sleeping in your bed. He dared not ask her what would happen to those who were discovered to be helping such a man. He understood implicitly that the stranger would not be the only one punished. Such was the nature of how things went on their island. He had already learned from the news about the stringent drug laws, which made little distinction between someone who’d been tricked into carrying a suitcase of cocaine across the border and someone who’d intended to. A life sentence or the death penalty awaited in both cases. Error, ignorance, charity—none of it was any defense. Associate with crime and one would be presumed a criminal.
“Are you all right, Shawn?”
“Yes,” he said, forcing himself to turn away from her soft, searching gaze.
That afternoon, as Shawn was heading home from school, he decided to stop at the provision store for an ice pop. Rarely did he spend his scant pocket money this way, but he wanted to avoid going home for just a few minutes longer. And so he went to the store and took his time selecting a plastic tube of purple crushed ice. Grape, his favorite flavor. The cold air from the freezer was delicious against his sweaty skin, and had the afternoon not been so sweltering, had he not lingered so long, he might have missed the stranger. But as it was, after Shawn had been standing there for several minutes, he saw the man walk into the store.
The stranger was wearing a green polo shirt and a pair of pants with a tightly cinched belt, all of which Shawn recognized as his father’s. The man must have gone through Chee Meng’s wardrobe for the outfit; at home, he wore only some old T-shirts and other castoffs that Shawn’s parents had scrounged up. How strange it was to see the man out in the world, beneath the bright electric lights of the provision store, walking among the customers in Shawn’s father’s clothes, as if his intrusion into their home was not enough.
Shawn had wished, for so long, for the stranger to leave their flat, but now he felt an urge to drag him out of the store and all the way back to his bedroom. Already it horrified Shawn to think of all the eyes that had noticed the man on his walk to the provision store. Had someone seen him leave their home, seen him shut the door behind him? Would someone have noticed his emaciated appearance, his foreign features, and been suspicious enough to call the authorities? As these thoughts raced through his mind, Shawn’s body froze.
The stranger approached the store owner, a stout man waving a rattan fan lazily at his face while sitting at the till.
“Cash or credit?” the owner asked.
“Job,” the stranger said. “I work.”
At first the owner stared at him blankly, then flashed a look of distaste, as if a dirty rodent had brushed his foot. He shook his head at the man. “No, no, no. No work here.”
“Work hard,” the stranger said in an insistent tone. He mimed stacking boxes. “I carry. I clean.”
“No work. No work here,” the owner said, his voice rising in threat. He flicked his fan as if shooing out a stray cat.
The stranger stared at him in mute disappointment, then turned and went out.
Hurriedly, Shawn paid for his ice pop—he would have abandoned it if the peeved owner hadn’t shouted at him for having left the freezer open so long—and ran out of the store. The stranger was nowhere to be seen.
Shawn’s nerves were jangling. What was the stranger trying to do? Had the family taken him in out of the goodness of their hearts, only for him to go out in the world and expose them like that? And no one would hire him this way. Why, even if they wanted to, he would need a work permit—that was how things were in this orderly land. Shawn knew that the man didn’t even have a passport on him, had heard his parents questioning him repeatedly about this to no avail. Confusingly, Shawn found himself now worrying about the stranger, feeling sorry about the futility of the man’s quest. The shopkeeper’s brusque response would no doubt be repeated over and over again. In some obscure way, Shawn felt responsible for protecting the stranger against the slights of his unyielding countrymen.
Worse still, Shawn could not stop thinking about the violent punishment that would be inflicted should the stranger be caught. Ah Gau’s gleeful face as he wielded the horrifying, imaginary cane. Rotan. It was frightening, it was awful. On one hand, he wanted the burden of the stranger taken off his family’s shoulders and out of their home. On the other, he was terrified for the man, with his slight build and wasted muscles. The coldness of confinement, the lash of the rod. The breaking of skin, the drawing of blood.
Shawn ducked into the Chinese-medicine shop next door.
“Yes, boy?”
“Um. Uncle. Was there a man here earlier?”
“A man?”
“Tall,” Shawn said, indicating with his hand. He paused. “Looking for work?”
“Oh, him.” The man behind the counter shook his head. “Foreigner? Very weird. Yes. He went next door.”
Shawn thanked him. As he left the medicine shop, he caught sight of the stranger walking ahead of him, evidently rejected by the shop next door as well. Shawn followed him at a distance. He’d meant to call to the man, to convince him to go home. But every time he opened his mouth, nothing came out. It was as though he’d been struck mute by the horror of the situation.
They ought not to be seen together in public, of course. A strange foreigner asking about jobs was one thing. A strange foreigner seen with Shawn, who had lived in this neighborhood all his life and was known to many, was a different matter altogether. Why, Shawn had already compromised himself by asking the medicine-shop man about the stranger.
Still, this was not why he didn’t stop the man. He was held back by something else, a feeling that some awful truth about his familiar, beloved world was now being revealed to him. Things will never be the same again, he found himself thinking, though he did not understand what he meant by this. For the rest of the afternoon, all Shawn did was trail behind the stranger as he went in and out of shops. No one, of course, would hire him. Some store owners wouldn’t even talk to the man, shooing him out as soon as they caught wind of what he was after. Others asked him whether he had a work permit, to which he only stared silently before turning around and walking away. A group of Bangladeshi workers lounging in the sun—perhaps he’d approached them because of their yellow hard hats, thinking they could get him a construction job—seemed to know at a glance that he was not one of them, had no permit or sponsor, and they all stood up and left quickly, with fearful, hurried looks. One particularly belligerent shop owner, a thin lady with a pinched face, threatened to call the police.
Finally, the stranger emerged from the last shop on the block. Shawn ducked behind a pillar, but he needn’t have done so, for the stranger had a desolate, faraway look on his face and was clearly absorbed in his own thoughts. He stood for a long time in the middle of the path, as people pushed and tsked their way past him. It was the hour before dinner now, housewives picking up last-minute ingredients, businessmen stopping for the evening paper on their way home, schoolchildren buying snacks and treats. Shawn realized that he was still holding his ice pop. It was completely melted at this point, the plastic tubing slick with condensation.
All afternoon he had simmered with a righteous anger at the stranger, waiting for the moment to confront him, sorting out plans in his head for how to tell his parents what the man had done, but as he watched the stranger now, standing alone there as people jostled by, he was filled with a cold, sour feeling, one that gnawed at him more inconveniently than the rage or fear he’d previously nursed. Shame—but shame over what? It was not Shawn’s fault, after all, that the stranger had come to this country through improbable and illegal means, that there were rules in place to insure order and safety in Shawn’s beloved homeland. It was not Shawn’s fault that the stranger was poor and desperate, that rules prevented him from being helped. None of it was his fault.
“Ask him to go,” Shawn’s mother whispered to his father each night. “He can’t stay here.”
“Go where?”
“Don’t know, but when he come here don’t tell me he got no plan?”
“How I know?”
“Every day you go work, I have to stay here with him.”
“He doesn’t do anything, right? Just stay in the room. And you go out in the afternoon to have coffee with your friends, anyway.”
“But we don’t know who he is! You not worried about your wife, your child? And what if someone finds out? We can go to prison, you know.”
“We will figure something out.”
“What? When?”
“Don’t worry so much. And what do you want him to do? The poor man got nowhere to go.”
“And is that our problem?”
At this, Chee Meng would tsk impatiently, as if to say she knew very well that it was their problem, and, quietly, she would begin to cry.
His mother stopped making long calls to friends the way she used to. His father stopped going out to fish on weekends. The front door had always been left open in the past, to allow a breeze to come in from the walkway outside, but Shawn’s parents now scolded him if he forgot to close it. Their two-bedroom flat was small and old, and with the doors shut and curtains drawn it felt mustier and more cramped than ever before.
Shawn still hadn’t told his parents about the stranger’s foray into the outside world. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was a one-time thing, and the stranger would now realize that there was no job and thus no life for him here, and he would go home. But Chee Meng kept complaining about his shirts being misplaced, and Shawn knew that the man was still slipping out, either to look for work or for other purposes. Day by day, the weight of the secret grew. He began to feel sick each night when he sat down for dinner with his parents, knowing what he knew and what they did not. Yet he could not bring himself to tell them, could not bear the panic and worry it would cause his mother, the blustering justification it would elicit from his father.
After weeks of torment, Shawn went into his bedroom one evening. There the stranger was, lying in Shawn’s bed, drinking from his mug. Shawn stared at the man with the fiercest look he could muster.
Go home, Shawn tried to say with his eyes. Go back where you came from. There is no place for you here. For all his frustration, he dared not say it out loud. The stranger’s hollow cheeks, his dark eyes, whose lashes always appeared wet, the bony shoulders that protruded from the singlet Chee Meng had lent him—all of it frightened Shawn.
Man and boy stared at each other. Then, for the first time, the stranger smiled. His cracked lips stretched hesitantly, revealing teeth that were surprisingly white.
“My son,” the stranger said, nodding. “You—same age, my son.”
Shawn recoiled. He did not want to think of the stranger as a father; he did not want to consider a world in which the stranger, wherever he was from, had left behind a boy not unlike himself. No, he thought, trying to remember Ah Gau’s rants. Come with drugs, come with weapons, who knows what else they bring in. Never mind that the man had come with nothing except the soaked trousers he wore when they found him on the beach or that he was clearly just trying to find a regular job. Illegal immigrant, Shawn reminded himself, summoning up the newscaster’s voice, thinking of the cardboard cutout of the policeman in the car park.
“I look for job,” the stranger said. “I bring son. Here.”
He was still smiling at Shawn, with a gentle look on his face. It made Shawn queasy. He was filled with a sudden sense of hopelessness, a rotten sadness. Slowly, he backed out of the bedroom, his small hands cold and clammy.
A new resolve came over him. When Ms. Chong asked her students to write a composition on their aspirations, he wrote three whole pages on how he would be a member of the Coast Guard when he grew up. Theirs was a small island, he wrote, with no natural resources. He had heard this in the Prime Minister’s National Day speech, right before the fireworks: great plumes of light shooting out over the dark water of the bay. They could not, as a nation, afford encroachment as other, larger countries might. Who knew what ills might be smuggled in by those who breached their hard-won borders of land and sea? For the poor, the desperate, it was a pity, but surely their country was too small to take on everyone’s problems.
He received top marks on the composition. “Good work,” Ms. Chong wrote, but Shawn gleaned no pleasure from the grade. Instead of taking the assignment home to show to his parents as he normally would have, he waited until everyone had left the classroom, then crushed the pages into a ball and threw it into the wastepaper bin.
Each afternoon, when he came home from school, he raced from the bus stop to their flat to see if the stranger was there. Sometimes he was, sitting mutely in Shawn’s bed or cleaning up the dishes in the kitchen. Several times he wasn’t. On those days, Shawn would go out into the neighborhood, to the shops and hawker centers, looking for the man. Sometimes he spotted him—clumsy in Chee Meng’s too-big pants, asking some harried hawker for a job, always with that dogged, insistent look on his face. Then Shawn would follow him, making sure the man didn’t see him, until he finished doing his rounds and headed back to their flat. Each time the door shut behind the man, Shawn had the feeling that some danger had been temporarily dodged, some crisis averted until the next day. Always he was alert to the possibility of a neighbor following the man home, or a hawker calling the police, or, indeed, the police themselves showing up at the door to arrest his parents for harboring the illegal immigrant. Each day that this did not happen, Shawn grew not more at ease but less. It was only a matter of time.
One day, he came home from school to find the man sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring pensively at nothing in particular. Not knowing what to do, Shawn picked up the TV remote and put on Channel 5. Again the man gave him that kind smile which made him so uneasy. Then, to Shawn’s alarm, he gently patted the sofa cushion next to him, beckoning him to sit down. Instead, Shawn ran into the kitchen, where his mother stood at the sink, and clung to her side. “What?” she asked him, stroking his hair. “What is it?”
“I’ll make him leave,” he mumbled into her T-shirt, breathing in the familiar scent of the soft, worn fabric.
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, looking up at her smooth, dear face, now crinkled with worry.
Quietly, he stepped out of the kitchen. From the doorway, he observed the man. He was staring at the television screen, a focussed look on his face. A variety show was on, the frothy contestants dunking one another in inflatable tubs filled with colorful jelly and rubber ducks. The stranger watched it with deathly seriousness, forehead furrowed as if thinking through some impossible problem. His lips moved just barely, as he repeated the game-show host’s words under his breath.
He was teaching himself English, Shawn realized. He had spoken barely any when they’d found him, and he could now say short phrases. The man’s collarbones no longer cast deep shadows at the base of his neck, Shawn noticed. His cheeks had filled out, and his arms were firm with muscle. Gone was the weak figure who’d washed up on the beach. With his long face bathed in the blue light of the television screen, there was a hard look to him, Shawn felt, even if it was true that he had a son Shawn’s age, even if, once, he had returned from one of his clandestine outings with a little paper windmill for Shawn, a shiny, childish thing, which he must have picked up from a playground or the street.
Shawn marched over to him, snatched up the remote control, and turned the television off. Then he pointed at the door and, in his bravest voice, told the man to leave.
“You’re fine now. You’re healthy. It’s time to go. Go!” He hated how small his voice was. But his finger, pointed firmly toward the door, was strong and resolute.
The man shook his head. He lightly patted both palms against the sofa cushions, as if this was indeed his home, as if he had always been here. He pointed at the screen.
“TV,” he said.
A helpless fury came over Shawn. He rushed over to the door and tried to open the latch, but it was stuck. As he fiddled with it, he felt the man’s silent gaze boring into the back of his head. Then warm hands on his. The man was standing next to him. Slowly, he helped Shawn undo the latch. Now the door was unlocked, but Shawn did not move to open it. Seconds ticked by as the two of them stood there, silence unspooling in the stuffy entryway of the flat. Shawn could hear his mother still clattering about in the kitchen, could smell the soapy smell of the man’s body. It was his father’s soap, unnervingly familiar.
He willed himself to open the door and show the stranger out. But all they did was stand there together, waiting, until Shawn dropped his hand and ran back to his parents’ room.
It was a Saturday evening some weeks later. Shawn, his parents, and the stranger were sitting around the dining table, their bowls of rice steaming before them, when the knock came.
His parents froze. They weren’t expecting anyone. Even before the stranger had arrived at their flat, an unexpected visitor would have been unusual. No one moved to answer the door. Perhaps, if they were quiet enough, whoever it was would go away.
But the knock came again, more insistent this time. And a woman’s voice.
“Hello? Ma’am? Sir? Are you home?”
Of course, their lights were on and could be seen through the window that gave onto the walkway, even with the curtains drawn.
“Hello? Please open the door. It’s important.”
Shawn’s eyes widened. The voice was official, familiar somehow.
“Who can it be?” his mother whispered furiously. “One of the neighbors?”
His father shrugged his shoulders. They both shot looks at the stranger, who, seemingly oblivious to the knocking, picked up his fork and began to eat.
“Don’t open,” Shawn said.
“What?” his father replied. “Why? Do you know who it is?”
“It’s the police,” Shawn mumbled, his cheeks hot.
“Don’t be silly,” his mother said. “Why would it be the police?”
She reached out to stroke his neck reassuringly. But the warmth of her hand on his skin only made Shawn feel more wretched. He thought of the thin shopkeeper with the pinched face, of the medicine-shop man. Of course they had suspected something. Of course they would have called the authorities.
“It’s the police,” he insisted. “Don’t open.”
Now his parents exchanged glances worriedly.
“Hello? Mr. Lim? Mrs. Lim? If you are home, please open the door. I need to speak to you.”
“This is ridiculous,” Chee Meng said in a low voice. “It is not the police.”
He stood up and began to make his way to the door. Then, as if thinking twice, he turned back to the man. “Still, better not to let anyone see you.” He gestured toward Shawn’s bedroom.
The man nodded. He seemed unperturbed, which infuriated Shawn. Did he not understand the iron rule of law, the efficiency of the police, the rotan? The man went into Shawn’s room and shut the door.
Shawn watched with dread as his father went to the entryway. Now the police would storm the flat, just as he had seen on TV, with their guns and handcuffs. There was nowhere, really, for the man to hide. Now his parents would be taken away, together with the stranger, in a flurry of uniforms and batons and flashing lights. Fatherless, motherless, he would be sent to a boys’ home.
“They’ll take him away now,” Shawn said to his mother.
“Don’t be silly,” his mother replied, but there was worry in her voice. “Maybe don’t, Chee Meng—” But Shawn’s father had already opened the door.
“Hello, Mr. Lim,” the woman said.
“Yes?”
Shawn let out the breath he’d been holding. Instead of men in uniforms, there was, improbably, the round, pleasant visage of his English teacher, Ms. Chong.
“It’s about Shawn. You haven’t come to any of the parent-teacher meetings, and I was passing through the neighborhood, so I thought I’d come see you.”
“Why? Shawn did something at school?”
“Oh, no, Shawn is an excellent student. But I’m worried about him. He’s been writing some rather odd compositions. Has he been watching a lot of TV recently?”
“No,” Chee Meng said. A surly note had entered his voice.
“He’s very preoccupied by violence and crime,” Ms. Chong went on. “He keeps talking about the police.”
“Aiya,” Chee Meng stuttered. “You know boys—that’s how they are.”
She paused. “Is everything all right at home?”
“Of course. We are eating dinner now, please.”
“I’m sorry to bother you. Will you make an appointment to come and see me at school, then?”
“Yes, O.K.” Chee Meng moved to shut the door in her face.
Shawn suddenly jumped up from his seat and raced to the entrance. “Ms. Chong!” he shouted.
“Shawn,” his father warned. “Go back inside.”
“Why, hello, Shawn.”
“Ms. Chong,” he said, his voice trembling. “There’s something I have to show you.”
His father’s hand gripped his shoulder. The words thrummed in his chest, fighting to come out. There’s a stranger here, an illegal immigrant, he wanted to say. If he told her, if she saw the man, then the whispered fights and gray, cooped-up evenings and strange, circuitous afternoons full of fear would end.
“Shawn?”
His heart pounded in his chest, so loudly he was sure the others could hear it. Ms. Chong’s voice was soft and sweet, like birthday cake, and it seemed to him the kindest voice he had ever heard. Something warm brushed his foot. It was the cat, scrawny and balding, ribs still showing despite all the expensive food Shawn’s parents fought over. Gently, Shawn touched his fingers to the cat’s head, and it began to purr.
Chee Meng announced to his son that they were to go on a special outing. It was the June holidays, the weather was unseasonably cool, and they hadn’t been fishing in so long. They would go to a different beach, a beach all the way out in Changi, and they would go at night, during high tide, in the hope of catching something big. A stingray or a reef shark, even.
Shawn clapped his hands with glee. Finally! A break from the morose cloud that had descended on their household.
Then his father tilted his chin toward the stranger’s bedroom. “Ask him to come,” he said.
“Why?” Shawn whined. “No, I don’t want to.”
His father shrugged. There was a tension about his shoulders, a resignation. “Ask him,” he said again, not meeting Shawn’s gaze.
Perhaps Chee Meng had seen the soft looks the stranger cast in Shawn’s direction and thought he would be more susceptible to the invitation if it came from the boy. Whatever it was, Shawn understood from his father’s feigned nonchalance that this would be no ordinary trip. Ever since Ms. Chong’s unexpected visit, Chee Meng had grown tense and brooding. Now it seemed that he had come to a decision. And so Shawn did as his father said and asked the man.
The stranger paused a long time before responding. His unblinking gaze, as knowing as the full moon on a humid night, would haunt Shawn for years to come. He thought of the man going through his father’s wardrobe, trying on his pants, searching for a belt. He thought of the hawkers and shopkeepers, saying no again and again.
After a long while, the stranger nodded. Yes, he would come.
Shawn’s mother packed curry puffs, fried fish balls, and potato chips for them as snacks, unhealthy treats that Shawn was not normally allowed to have, that she had gone out of her way to buy. Was it his imagination, or were his mother’s eyes teary as she handed them the plastic bags of food?
They set off shortly after dinner, filling the boot of the car with rods and pails and bait as they’d done so many times before. The stranger sat in the back seat, as he had the first day, except that now he held himself upright and stared curiously out the window.
The dense blocks of flats receding in Shawn’s side-view mirror were bathed in warm orange light. But they were no longer a comforting sight for him, as they had been in the past. He found himself wondering about all the secrets that were kept behind each closed door. The tidy nature of the buildings, which had once been a source of pride for Shawn, now appeared threatening in its precision. He had learned the cost of such order. There was no place for the stranger in their country, in their lives. What else was shut out of this safest country in the world?
Forty minutes into the drive, the buildings had been replaced by jungle. Shawn felt that he had never been so far from home in his life, not even during Chinese New Year, when they drove across the island to visit his great-uncle in Woodlands. Eventually, they came to an empty car park. A sliver of moon gleamed behind a wisp of cloud, lighting the sand beyond the asphalt. Shawn and his father got out.
“Come.” Chee Meng beckoned to the stranger.
There was a long silence, and, for a moment, Shawn had the awful fear that the stranger would not leave their car. Neither his father nor he wanted to acknowledge what they were doing, but, if the man were to resist, they would be forced to. Cheeks burning, Shawn began to unload the fishing gear from the boot.
After a few seconds, the stranger stepped out of the car. Chee Meng handed him their plastic bags of food, and, slowly, the three of them made their way down to the surf. The beach was empty. No lights shone from blocks of flats; no sounds of traffic came from any road. Only the dark bodies of container ships, crowned with blinking lights, massed along the sea’s horizon, as solid as a wall.
On one of the ships out there, Shawn imagined a young sailor, far from home, perhaps not much older than he was. Unable to sleep, the boy would be out on the deck, staring at the island city before him. He would see the forests of flats in which millions of people slept; Marina Bay in all its splendor; the luxury hotels beaming brilliance into the cloudy sky; the expressways, bright and busy no matter the time of day. He would see unthinkable prosperity, an island of impossible light, surrounded by dark and hungry waves.
What he would not see: three small figures standing on a deserted beach on the lip of all that light. He would not see Chee Meng shove the stranger toward the water; he would not see Shawn take one step forward and then one back; he would not see the stranger standing alone and mournful on the sand, watching father and son disappear into the trees, get into their car, and begin the long drive back to the safety of their silent home. ♦