The Black Isle by Sandi Tan Page A

covered in gooseflesh. I was ashamed for these women, yet also terrified, and tried to conceal my nerves with excessive smiling.
    “I can tell you’re going to do very well here,” Sister Nesbit said, all maternal encouragement as she led me inside the building whose darkness her bright attitude had scant prepared me for.
    What saved me was the nuns’ generosity of spirit, which forced me to put on a brave front, day after day. Was I terrified of the mouthless, naked specters that crisscrossed the classrooms? Of course I was. Did I dread morning assembly at Shaw Hall, with the long-haired schoolgirl dangling from the ceiling fan, shaking out her final spasms inches from Sister Nesbit’s wimple? I felt sick every time. I even grew numb whenever the nuns spoke of “the Holy Ghost” in prayer.
    The most dreadful room in the building was also the one impossible to avoid: the toilet. Windowless, pungent in the extreme, and lit by a lone bare bulb, it had five mossy stalls, each fitted with an oval hollow in the tiled floor that always became clogged by noon. A low bank of sinks lined one wall, their mirrors cracked and smeared with dark, unwashable stains that looked suspiciously like old blood. One didn’t need a special gift to know that unspeakable things had happened here. The first time I stepped into the gloomy room, I saw four naked European women lying on the grimy white tiles, their bluish, milky rib cages marred by cuts and bruises, their eyes staring at me. The stalls were worse—each had its own phantom guardian crouching behind the door. Every time I entered, I thought of the sadhu’s words— very dirty .
    I yearned to tell Sister Nesbit that her school was swarming with horrors. Yet how could I crush the nuns’ illusions with my righteous testimony? Ghosts would have proved false the efficacy of prayer, a practice they were working so hard to instill in their two hundred impressionable young wards; ghosts would have attacked the core of the missionaries’ idealism, that the dark Isle was worth illuminating. This was assuming, of course, that the sisters took my warnings seriously at all. Surely I could close my eyes and hold my tongue long enough to absorb a few years of verbs, adverbs, and long division, skills that would help me transcend the narrow rooms of Father’s world?
    The alternative was clear: hard child labor, Bullock Cart Water forever. Damnation.
    I don’t know what Li’s scholastic life was like in those days, but it couldn’t have been much grander. I watched him grow into a quiet boy plagued with bouts of exhaustion, chained to a thrice-weekly regimen of boiled pig’s blood to curb his anemia. On his good days, he played sports with his mates—soccer, rugby, rounders, badminton—and this meant that we grew into very different people. I devoured books, whereas he read nothing at all. We increasingly had nothing to talk about. We continued to sleep back to sticky back like a two-headed beast: he with the gold toffee disk tucked into his hand and me making tense, tight fists. I suppose we each, in our own way, were praying for a better future.
    Everywhere in our neighborhood, however, steps were constantly being taken to protect the past, which, to most, meant the dead. The zealous staged street operas in Teochew and Cantonese to distract their ghost relatives from mischief, burned “hell money” to support their netherworldly spending, and placed six-inch blocks in entryways to prevent the unwelcome ones from supposedly gliding in—not that any of these measures made a bit of difference, as I often felt like telling them.
    “Don’t you stare at me,” Father barked at me one afternoon when I returned to find him nailing a small, hexagonal mirror above our room door. “I bought this from the Taoist temple down the road. Better safe than sorry, don’t you think?”
    To my dismay, our father had become superstitious. Once so modern, he now absorbed the old-fashioned panic around