Status Updates From We, the Survivors

Great Book!

‘—whistling—the chorus—an Anita Mui number that was so off-key I couldn’t recognise it at first. We were frightened not by the death, or the savagery of the killing—we grew up by the sea—we’d seen worse—but by how easily a life could be scrubbed out without trace—someone actually pays you not to see dirty, upsetting shit. Our bodies—every fibre of every muscle, every tiny nerve—they remember what our minds forget.’

‘Funny how people use that word—kampung—when what they mean isn’t a village—surrounded by trees and flowers, but a semi-slum, a shanty without amenities except for one or two cheap generators that everyone chips in to feed with diesel now and then—Plantation after plantation—‘Thank goodness you’re here. I would have driven halfway to Taiping by now.’ The experience sobered him up—he spoke Hakka—he’d learned enough—’

‘The sea was always restless—We were never certain of anything with the sea—When you grow up by the sea—the tides are as constant and present as the air around you. You think you know everything about them. You understand how destructive and regenerative they can be. How they carry the boats out to sea and bring them back again. The winds would gather from the south-west, and you’d know that cyclones were building—’

‘Nature is beautiful—from afar—What makes a person leave a country for another country where they could be persecuted for exactly the same thing? You get on a boat in Sumatra—we’re all OK now, why do you care? She—wanted her history, her entire self, to be scrubbed out from the world. If anything happened, she could just slip away into the sea. My grandparents—originally from Fujian—drifting on the ocean for months—’

‘—plastic bags—like swollen ghostlike fruit. Sometimes I’d see strange shapes drifting in—river. Fallen tree trunks & bushes uprooted by the storms upstream, tangled together in huge rafts that looked like some sort of mythical beast from Journey to the West. I was listening to Jacky Cheung on my phone—Sony Ericssons—crackly, as if you were listening to it on the radio in a faraway country—Ramly burger with Keong—’