The Black Isle by Sandi Tan Page B

him. He grew gray and gaunt, losing most of his hair and a quarter of his body weight. To hide his sunken chest, he developed a pronounced hunch: A bone that looked like a baby’s elbow jutted out of his upper back, just below the neck. The old stork was turning into a camel. His fearfulness meant that I had to act bravely at home, as I did at school, to spare him additional worry. Naturally, I never mentioned the eyeless old man who had begun appearing every night at the foot of his bed.
     
    Through the early 1930s, even during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the sneak attacks culminating in the occupation of Shanghai, Mother stayed in touch. At first I would rip open her letters the moment they arrived, savoring any news of the twins, but I soon found that to read Mother’s letters was to be driven mad with frustration. The little ones were very well, she always wrote without variation, and she was very well, too. No mention was ever made of the checkpoints that were reportedly making daily life so impossible or of the nighttime gun battles between the Republican army and the Japanese military that we heard so much about on the wireless. I learned more about occupied Shanghai from the mass boycott of Japanese brothels in Chinatown than from anything Mother cared to share.
    She always signed off, “Yours sincerely, Mother.” No love, no kisses, just cordial sincerity, as if she’d been forced to pen these missives at gunpoint when what she really wanted to do was go out and dance on the beach. I had a theory that she was being held captive by the Japanese, but when I shared this with Father, he laughed so hard—and so acridly—that I thought the throbbing vein on his forehead would burst.
    Not that Father, I suspect, ever painted her the full picture from our side. He wrote home every other month and sent along whatever money he could save, but steady work kept eluding him; not one of his clerking positions had lasted longer than two months. Most of the Chinese bosses were from Guangdong Province or Fujian, few of whom spoke English and none of whom had the patience to penetrate Father’s Shanghainese-fattened Mandarin. The lingua franca of the street was in fact Malay. Even the European towkays (bosses, in the Island vernacular) had to pick up a few words of it to make themselves understood to the help.
    Father resisted learning. But it wasn’t all his fault; bad luck kept his spirits down. The Depression had left this part of the world tattered and raw. Walking to and from St. Anne’s, I saw rickshaw coolies squatting in the shade, some without fares for days. Beside them were construction workers (many of them Chinese women), wharf laborers, beggars, all stooping together in what at first appeared to be silent solidarity but, at a second glance, was clearly bewilderment so deep as to have rendered every single one of them speechless. Only their children had the enterprise to beg, filling the district with their ubiquitous cry: “No mother, no father, no supper, no soda!”
     
    After school, I often sat on a stone bench in the traffic island dividing Spring Street, the main artery of Chinatown. This island was tiny: just a small, raised slab with barely enough room for the bench, a hibiscus bush, and the pedestal where Mr. Singh, the Sikh policeman, stood directing traffic with oversized canvas sleeves fastened to his arms like wings. It was here, watching the throngs in cars, trams, buses, and on foot, that I received my practical education.
    The Chinese, who made up a little more than half of the populace, came in a wide variety, from slave to millionaire. The ones known as Peranakans, whose families had been in the Nanyang for generations and proudly spoke no Chinese at all, fared the best. The rich ones swanned into Chinatown in big cars, trailed by uniformed servants, eager to distinguish themselves from the newcomers. The indigenous Malays mostly worked as drivers and laborers or led