When my mother and I had first moved in, I’d been amazed at how strict my new stepfather was with Shin. He seemed to expect absolute obedience. At home, Shin barely spoke unless he was spoken to; he was a shadow of the boy that I came to know outside the house. In fact, I was rather surprised at how popular Shin was. Knots of children appeared every day to play with him. Since they were all boys, he didn’t bother to introduce me but simply ran off. That impish, excited look on his face was never seen in the house, and soon I discovered why.
Shin had gone off one afternoon while I had to stay behind, pinching the roots off an enormous pile of fat, crisp bean sprouts. I didn’t like them, but my stepfather did, and so my mother often fried them with salted fish.
While I gloomily picked away, my stepfather came home. He walked silently through the kitchen, then checked the courtyard, his nostrils turning white with anger. Shin had forgotten to bag and weigh the drying piles of tin ore. When he finally returned, his father took him to the back and caned him for every pile he’d forgotten.
The cane was four feet long and as thick as a man’s thumb, nothing like the weak rattan switch that my mother occasionally disciplined me with. Seizing Shin by the collar, his father wound his arm back as far as it would go. There was a hiss, then an explosive crack that resounded through the courtyard. Shin’s knees buckled. A choked cry squeezed out of his throat. I tried to tell myself that he deserved it, but by the second stroke, I was weeping.
“Stop!” I screamed. “He’s sorry! He won’t do it again!”
My stepfather looked at me in utter disbelief. For an instant I was terrified that he would cane me, too, but he glanced at his new wife who appeared, white-faced, behind me, and slowly put the cane down. He didn’t say a word, but went back into the store.
That night Shin cried and I couldn’t bear it. I pressed my mouth against the wooden wall that separated us.
“Does it hurt?”
He didn’t reply, but the sobs intensified.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said at last.
“Do you need ointment?” I had some Tiger Balm in my room, the all-purpose Chinese salve rumored to contain boiled tiger bones. It claimed to cure everything from mosquito bites to arthritis.
There was a pause. “All right.”
I slipped out into the dark corridor. Though I knew my stepfather and mother were safely in their bedroom at the front of the shophouse, I had to steel myself before opening the door to Shin’s small room. It was a mirror image of my own, the beds reversed against the wall. He was sitting up in bed. In the moonlight, he looked very young and small, even though we were about the same size. I unscrewed the jar of Tiger Balm, and in silence, helped him rub it on the welts on his legs. When I was done, he seized my sleeve.
“Don’t go.”
“Just for a bit, then.” There’d be trouble if I were discovered, but I lay down next to him. He curled up like a small animal, and without thinking, I patted his hair. I thought he might object, but he only said, “My mother used to sit with me sometimes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. Last year.”
Only a year, I thought. My father, my real father, had been gone for three years. If my mother had owned a big shophouse like this, she wouldn’t have had to remarry, I told myself. I imagined the two of us growing potted orchids in the courtyard, making nian gao, the sweet sticky new year’s rice cake together as we’d done before. We would have been just fine by ourselves.
“When I grow up, I’ll never get married,” I said.
I thought he might make fun of me. After all, that was what girls were supposed to do. But Shin considered it seriously. “Then I won’t get married either.”
“I suppose you’ll be all right. You’ll have the business.” My stepfather was keen for Shin to carry on. Although he himself was one of the smaller tin-ore dealers, others in his trade had done extremely well, and there was money to be made in reinvestments.
“You can have it. I’m leaving as soon as I can.”
I snorted. “Don’t want it. I’m the one who’s going to leave.”
He started to laugh, and buried his head under the pillow to muffle the sound. As he did so, a wrinkled piece of paper fell out. It had a single Chinese character written on it: 獏.
“What’s this?” In the wavering moonlight, it was hard to make out. “Is it an animal?”
Shin made a grab for it. “My mother wrote it for me,” he said gruffly. “It’s the character for mo—you know, tapir.”
I’d seen pictures of a tapir. It had a nose like a stunted elephant’s trunk, and black and white markings as if the front of the animal had been dipped in ink, while the back part had been heavily floured, like a rice dumpling. It was supposed to be quite large, almost six feet long, yet difficult to see in the jungle.
“Your mother’s writing was beautiful.” My own mother was illiterate, which was why she’d always been keen on sending me to school and to Chinese brush-writing classes on weekends.
“She came from the north of China. That paper is for me. When I have bad dreams. Mo is a dream-eater, don’t you know?”
“Do you mean a real tapir, from the jungle?” I wondered what sort of stories Shin’s mother had told him. My own family had been in Malaya for three generations; though we still spoke Chinese, we’d also adapted to life under British rule here.
“No, the dream-eater is a ghost animal. If you have nightmares, you can call it three times to eat the bad dreams. But you have to be careful. If you call it too often it will also gobble up your hopes and ambitions.”
There was silence while I digested this. I wanted to ask Shin whether this charm for dream-eaters really worked, and whether he’d ever seen one, but he’d fallen asleep, so I crept quietly back to my own bed.
* * *
When people who didn’t know our family circumstances discovered that Shin and I shared the same birthday, they assumed we were twins even though we didn’t look alike. My mother had a soft spot for him, and she’d touch our heads affectionately.
“It’s good you have a brother now, Ji Lin.”
“But he won’t call me Ah Jie,” I’d point out, aggrieved. It was my right to be called “older sister,” even if I held that advantage by only five hours. But Shin willfully ignored this, calling me by my given name and sticking out his tongue.
In some ways it would be better if he still did such things, but the last two years, Shin had grown strangely aloof. It was inevitable, I supposed, though it stung. But I was too proud to hang around like the other girls and so miserable over being forced to leave school before my Upper Sixth, that I’d had little time to worry about this change in him. If it came down to it, however, I thought I could still rely on Shin. To be my ally, to keep my secrets. And to identify severed fingers. At least, I hoped I could.
* * *
Dinner that night was a silent affair, despite the luxury of a whole steamed chicken rubbed with sesame oil. It sat, expertly chopped into bite-sized pieces, on a large platter. None of us had touched it; it was as mutely reproachful as Shin’s empty seat. My mother asked timidly after him.
“He said he’d be out tonight.” My stepfather shoveled food into his mouth, chewing methodically.
“I should have told him I was going to kill a chicken today.” My mother cast a worried glance at the bird, as though Shin would materialize behind it. I stifled a snort.
“How long is he back for?” I asked.
“He has a part-time job at the Batu Gajah hospital, so he’ll be here for the summer.” My mother looked pleased. Actually, there was no “summer” here in Malaya. It was the tropics, after all, though we’d adopted the vocabulary of summer holidays as a result of being a colony. But I didn’t say any of this aloud. It was always better to say less during mealtimes.
“Is Shin staying here?” Batu Gajah was more than ten miles away. I couldn’t imagine that Shin would choose to spend much time under the same roof as his father.
“The hospital has staff quarters. He said it was more convenient.” She glanced swiftly at my stepfather, who continued chewing in silence. He was in a good mood, I could tell. Ever since Shin had won a scholarship to study medicine, he’d been perversely proud of him. Being congratulated on such a clever son must have gone to his head.
It was odd that Shin would come to a district hospital like Batu Gajah when he could easily have worked as an orderly at the Singapore General Hospital, as he had over Christmas. I’d never been to Singapore, though I’d pored over postcards of St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the famous Raffles Hotel with its Long Bar that ladies weren’t supposed to go to.
My mother gave another anguished look at the untouched chicken. “Whom did Shin go out with tonight?”
“Ming, and another friend. Robert, he said.” My stepfather helped himself to a piece of chicken, and with a sigh, my mother followed suit, placing it on my plate.