Status Updates From Das Gewicht der Zeit (Germa...

‘The landscape—mountains—highway rips right through the country, a long thread up the spine of the peninsula. Palm tree plantations give way to paddy fields. ‘Please don’t become one of those people who list all the ways Malaysian food isn’t as good—the worst kinds of Singaporeans.’ They walk to a kopitiam—plastic chairs—coffee, good & strong with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom—Thai name—Piyamit—dear friend’

‘—our faces aren’t that different, but everything else is. Is it just all our different choices, cumulatively, or something more fundamental? He feels it—a void between them. If only we could have been closer, he thinks—But there was—that distance, both geographical & the other—runs his fingers over the counter—the texture calling back something like memory—Chinese writing—I hope you are healthy, I hope you are safe’

‘Each death is a severing—though there are too many of those for him to become completely untethered. Henry orders too much food: chicken rice, simmered in fragrant stock & served with chilli; double-boiled herbal soup; fried oysters in an omelette; and a shaved-ice concoction—thick stalks of sugarcane through a mechanical crusher, squeezing out the sweet green liquid. ‘Chrysanthemums’ he smiles, we’re not pantang.’

‘Everyone in this part of the world was touched by history—had their own stories, insulated as they were, why wouldn’t people here? What did she do in London? She was tempted to mention—paying her respects at the graves—in Highgate Cemetery but sarcasm wouldn’t work—Mid-Autumn came & went. She was given a mooncake with her lunch. ‘Do you celebrate the Lantern Festival?’ he asked, as if testing how Chinese she was.’

‘‘The Brits don’t care about you,’ he said, ‘they, don’t either. You know what they call us? ‘Pendatang’, visitor.’ Her English was fluent, but Putonghua? She was just as alien as the rest of them—She keeps breaking into Hakka, & I only know Cantonese. Not alright, she wanted to cry—lives are still being destroyed over it. What can I say? I’m not the right person for the story, except somehow I’m the one who’s here.’

‘She wished Singapore had seasons—variations in temperature—to sense the passage of time by how the air was changing—He’d decided on Economics, because the country would need a lot of help finding its feet & he was convinced this was the best way for him to make a contribution. He used to talk about an image in one of his books, a bird flying—The air smelled of salt—the sea, inky waves—She looked for the other shore’

‘What impoverished minds—ones who could only imagine contorting themselves to fit in rather than smashing their confines—But it was difficult—they were only allowed three books—she needed a dictionary to make sense of anything, then kept getting stuck—not being able to look it up—because she’d used up her allocation. Finally she gave up, and read more Lu Xun—So many ways to be a person—she could be any shape at all.’

‘They inhabited such different worlds—if not for this—they might have gone their whole lives without encountering each other—The chaos had levelled everything—here was a chance to blaze through the world—to make it fair—She understood—her life had been an exercise in false consciousness. What was gratitude but complacency & quiescence? It was imperative to demand more. Chrysanthemums—called to something in her blood’

‘—porous memory forces repeats of entire conversations—in Nanyang Girls’ uniform—Let the dead return. They were both children of 1940s—she fascinated him. He wanted to know more, not just about her, but about everything. His friends mocked them, still clinging to the language of the old country—when they’d been born here. He had to meet her again—What is it that made one look at another being, and somehow just know?’