The Black Isle by Sandi Tan

girls. It was only after speaking to the Koos that we discovered our foolishness: karang guni meant “discards,” not “children.” He was only the dustman.
    In that tight space, a tense, unspoken rivalry grew between the three fathers for jobs, schools, food. There were always unhappy looks whenever a child from one family was caught playing with one from another. After a while I realized why. We had entered a kind of limbo, a transitional period in which we were meant to form no ties, exchange no secrets; it was the loathsome interregnum we were never to speak of again once we settled into our real lives as respectable Islanders with our own private apartments. Already we never spoke of our passage on the ship. The collective amnesia Father, Li, and I feigned just had to keep on expanding.
    And so our first weeks passed.
    Mosquitoes sucked at our blood, geckoes shat in our food, and we fell asleep—even in the stony heart of Chinatown, with no sea view and nary a sprig of green—to the howls of wild dogs and the arias of ten thousand insects. Still, we dreamed.
     
    Li and I were sent to free day schools run by missionaries—Oldham Boys for him, St. Anne’s for me—but contrary to literary cliché, we were not put to work weaving rugs, nor were we set upon with paddles and canes by mad, grinning nuns. We paid in prayer, yes, but lucky for us, the good brothers and sisters wanted first and foremost to turn the children of the Black Isle into learned little people—catechism came only after Chaucer, mass only after math.
    St. Anne’s was a two-story Victorian box on Emerald Hill, just beyond the business district. Its founding donor was one Ignatius Wee, the rare philanthropist of Chinese descent who did not demand the place be named after him nor that a pair of snaggletoothed foo dogs flank the entryway. The only visible marker of Mr. Wee’s generosity was a plain brass plaque outside the staff room with the simple legend IGNATIUS WEE, PATRON . The somber gray building could have passed for a tourist landmark had it not been for its notorious former life as an asylum, a memory the nuns had done nothing to rub out.
    On my first day there, I learned a new word, which, I suppose, boded well for my education.
    “Guano,” announced Sister Enid Nesbit, the apple-cheeked and uncommonly kind headmistress, anticipating what must have been the question most asked of her. “That’s not frosting or candle wax. It’s just guano.”
    We were standing outside in the midday sun. She was pointing at the school’s roof, from which weird gray spears hung from the eaves like stalactites, blackening with each successive monsoon.
    “Guano?” I asked meekly, every bit the new girl whose father was so underinformed as to enroll her in the middle of term.
    “Guano is feces, or more specifically, bat feces.” Sister Nesbit beamed, almost house-proud. “There are pigeon droppings mixed in there, too, of course, but it is still mainly bats. We’ve loads of bats. You could almost say we’re quite—”
    “Batty?”
    She laughed. “Could be…though I was actually going to say we’re quite well fortified for a convent school, because guano makes for excellent gunpowder.”
    Sister Nesbit, I would later learn, was the product of a Calcutta birth and fifty-odd years spent shuffling between the port towns of the empire, a history that helped explain her ability to turn every mishap or disgrace into an opportunity for learning.
    In truth, I had not paid much heed to the discolored walls. Instead my eyes were transfixed by what I saw through the windows: waxen European women, clearly not students or teachers, staring out of the classrooms like dress shop dummies. They did have faces, or at least partially—gray-rimmed eyes and smudged noses, no mouths—and they were naked, their bare breasts varying in shape and sag.
    There were so many of them. My school was a gallery of dead women.
    Sister Nesbit was oblivious, but my arms were