Selections from Print: "The Mountain of Longing" by Leeyee Lim
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
In my family it was well known that my grandfather had once shot a baby slow loris by mistake. When asked to tell the story, my grandfather always reiterated three things: It was night time. The jungle was dark. He had been aiming for what he’d thought was a civet cat traveling through the trees alone.
This was back when it was still acceptable to hunt wild game, even endangered. But in the slow seconds that followed his release of the bullet he saw a tiny figure fall to the ground, light as a puff, and my grandfather felt the breath leave his lungs. He crept closer and saw the furred ears, the white markings on its brown face. Then there was a movement above his head: the mother, coming down from the tree to look for her fallen baby. In the glare of his flashlight, he saw tears in the animal’s outsized brown eyes as she stood beside her dead child. My grandfather went home that night and put away his hunting rifle for good.
I am thinking about this story as the plane begins its descent into Kuala Lumpur. From my window seat, I watch as the city comes into view, a zig-zagging network of highways, grey buildings and swathes of palm oil plantations. The Langat River curves around ochre patches of cleared soil.
Over the PA system the pilot’s voice comes on: “Kepada semua warganegara Malaysia, selamat pulang ke tanahair.” I stare down at a curve in the river and wonder what my grandfather did with the slow loris he killed. Did he dig a hole and bury the body? Or did he simply leave the dead animal there by the tree? My grandfather never included that detail and there’s no way for me to know now. An image comes into my mind: Daniel, alone in our living room in Sydney, his laptop open on the table, footy playing on the TV.
“To all visitors, welcome to Malaysia, and to all Malaysians, welcome home.”
The arrivals hall is chaos and for a moment I stand still, afraid to enter the crowd of people awaiting relatives and friends. Anna, I hear someone call, Anna. My mother appears, a small figure wearing khaki shorts and a golf shirt, waving and calling my name. She is happy to see me—it has been two years since I came home—but is trying to subdue her happiness in the way of Chinese mothers who believe that it does their children no great good to be shown too much affection. She takes one of my suitcases and together we make our way to the lifts. Even with my mother to guide me, the airport feels cavernous. I am surrounded by a cacophony of Malay, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, the familiar sounds pressing against me. In the lift, a small boy peers at me from his pram. I wiggle my eyebrows at him and am rewarded with a chuckle.
“Tired?” my mother asks, once we are settled in the car.
“Not really,” I say. “I took a nap on the plane.”
“Never mind, you can sleep on the way, okay?” she says, as if she hasn’t heard me. It’s a three-hour drive to my mother’s hometown, where she returned six years ago to take care of my grandmother. They live in the house my mother grew up in, the house my cousins and I always referred to as ‘Ah Mah’s house’ despite the fact that it was my grandfather who built it.
We pass a billboard with a Malaysia Airlines advertisement: “Arrive as a visitor, leave as a guest.” Another billboard is emblazoned with the frighteningly large face of a supermodel. There are new housing developments I don’t recognize, industrial parks that weren’t here the last time I came home.
My mother chats to me in Hokkien, even though she knows I will reply in English. My grasp of the dialect is rudimentary. She asks about the weather in Sydney, about a cousin who recently moved there, about the arrangements I’ve made to store the stuff I didn’t bring home. In short, she asks about everything except what she most wants to know. She doesn't fool me. She is biding her time.
We fall into silence and I watch the palm oil and rubber estates pass by outside the window. There are rest areas crowded with buses, old ladies lining up to use the restrooms, children buying snacks. Everyone looks a little unwashed, covered with layers of sweat and the grime of travel. During the last forty-five minute stretch, I fall asleep.
I wake up just as we’re pulling into my grandmother’s driveway. The house looks smaller than I remember and so does my grandmother when she appears in the doorway. She is wearing a soft brown cotton blouse and loose pants. In the manner of very old people, she has shrunk.
“Ah Mah,” I greet her. The words feel funny in my mouth. She takes my hand in hers and then reaches up to pat my arm, my shoulder. She’s not wearing her dentures and her mouth wrinkles inwards, her smile innocent of teeth.
She’s talking now in Hokkien, asking if I have eaten, if I’m hungry, if I would like a snack, a bath, a nap. I reply haltingly, surprised to find the words coming back to me. Perhaps the conversation with my mother has sunk into the synapses of my brain while I napped, awaking the words inside. Or perhaps it is this country’s way of evoking memories I’ve forgotten I possessed, that have lain dormant for years while I lived my Sydney life with Daniel. Now the unceasing heat and the scent of my grandmother’s rice powder, cool and white on her skin, calls them back.
My grandmother’s house is in a small town in the state of Perak, nestled at the foothills of a low mountain range whose highest peak is Gunung Rindu, the mountain of longing. When my grandfather brought her here half a century ago, he built her a typical village house, the floor of polished cement, the walls half-papan and half-concrete, furnished with rattan furniture and flowered cotton curtains. At the back of the house, beside the big, airy kitchen, he constructed an open-air courtyard and dug a well. Over half the well he built the bathroom, so that when my mother was a child she drew the same cold groundwater to bathe as she did to cook.
I carry my bag upstairs, depositing it in the room next to my mother’s. It is the room I always stay in when I am at my grandmother’s house. As a child, I shared it with two or three other girl cousins every Chinese New Year, giggling and whispering into the night as we counted the money in our red packets. My mother comes in while I’m putting away my stuff and sits on the bed.
“Girl-ah,” she says. She calls me this despite the fact that I just turned thirty. My actual name is reserved for more official occasions, like meeting me at the airport, or when she is angry at me.
I shake out a pair of shorts, trying to smooth out the creases.
“Ma ask you something, can?”
“Sure.”
So it begins. She gets up and takes the shorts from me, shaking them out once, with great severity. Then she whips them into a perfect square and lays them in the drawer. “Your divorce, final already?”
I dredge up more clothes from my bag and pile them into the rest of the drawers. I’m surprised at her question. I’d expected something less direct, perhaps about Daniel or his parents. “I suppose so. Pretty final. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing. Ma just asking.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” she says. She begins to refold my clothes, taking each piece out and fixing it before returning it to the drawer. She’s still there when I leave to take a shower.
At dinner that night, there is a whole salt-baked chicken, steamed pomfret with ginger, stir-fried greens with garlic. My grandmother has put in her dentures and is making full use of them.
“Your grandmother especially went to the market this morning for the chicken,” my mother says.
“Tastes great, Ah Mah.”
My grandmother smiles and nods, pleased. We eat in silence for a while. Then out of the corner of my eye I see my mother nudge my grandmother with her elbow. My grandmother frowns a little, then shakes her head at my mother and continues scooping rice into her mouth.
For heaven’s sake. “Just say it, Ma.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever it is you’ve been wanting to say.”
“Ma don’t know what you mean.” My mother holds her chopsticks poised in the air, the rice bowl in her other hand, and I can feel something hover between us.
“Fine,” I say.
She frowns. “Fine, what fine? Why must you always be like that? Ma say something little bit only you get angry.”
“Oh? I thought you had nothing to say?” I know she’s referring to our earlier conversation, when she asked if my divorce was final. I know I’m just provoking her, but I can’t help it. “I’m not angry,” I add. “I just don’t like it when people don’t say what’s on their minds.” As soon as I’ve spoken I realize why the words sound so familiar. It’s the same thing Daniel has accused me of on half a dozen occasions.
“Ma has nothing on my mind.”
“Oh, really. Nothing at all? You’re not going to say ‘I told you so’? Not going to point out what a huge mistake it was for me to marry Daniel? You’re not going to say that if I was going to get divorced, why did I get married in the first place?”
She’s silent. Her face folds as neat and smooth as my pair of shorts, a perfect square of reticence.
“Admit it, Ma.”
And then she puts her bowl down: “You think Ma don’t know why you married that Daniel? So young, you got married, only twenty-one. You think Ma don’t know why? Ma knows. You were scared. Wait for a while then maybe you realize you don’t want to marry him after all, right? Maybe you realize you don’t love him after all, isn’t it? You think Ma stupid is it?”
I haven’t seen her this worked up in years. The perfect square has completely unfolded.
“Marry Daniel already then no need to come home la right? You wanted that life so badly, didn’t you? All the dinner-dinner parties with all those ang moh friends of yours, standing around your big house, drinking wine like so elegant like that. You wanted to be that woman, isn’t it? Wear high heels everyday, expensive perfume, talk good English just like the ang mohs.”
“Ma, stop.”
“But see, in the end also have to come home right. In the end also Ma and Ah Mah here taking care of you, isn’t it?”
“I wanted to come home, Ma. No one forced me to.” I hate the picture that she’s painting of me. Her words make me squirm. But she continues as if I hadn’t said anything.
“You think Ma don’t know all these things? Ma knows. Just don’t want to say only. These things say out loud also not nice to hear, right? So better don’t say.”
My grandmother, whose face has been bent over her rice bowl during this entire exchange, reaches out swiftly and spears one of the chicken thighs with her chopsticks. She deposits this in my bowl, picks up the other thigh and places it in my mother’s bowl, then returns to her own meal.
My mother and I look down. The yellow chicken skin glistens underneath the fluorescent lights. I want to take my mother’s chopsticks from her. I want to hold her hands and feel the callused skin, the pads of her fingers so hardened that the whorls stand out, clear and distinct. I want to tell her that it’s possible to fall in love with the details of a man, to be drawn to his life, to convince yourself that it is love because you don’t know any better, or think you don’t. But we have never been that type of mother and daughter, and sitting there at my grandmother’s table, I am unable to find the words to tell this woman, who loved my father in the simplest manner possible from the time they met until the day he died, that there are a hundred other feelings that can be mistaken for love, and that it is not always possible to tell the difference between loving a man and loving all the things about him.
My mother sighs and picks up her bowl. “Eat your chicken.”
After dinner, I join my grandmother on the veranda where she’s drinking tea. “Ah Mah,” I say, “Hoh boh?”
“Wah hoh,” she replies. I’m fine.
I refill her teacup and pour one for myself. My grandmother drinks tie guanyin, Iron Goddess tea, strong and fragrant. From somewhere down the road I hear the grating rumble of a motorcycle. Before us lies the mountain range and Gunung Rindu, a shadowy pyramid rising gently into the sky. In the evening darkness the mountain looks further than it actually is. When she was a child, my mother once told me, her father would sometimes pack her and her siblings into the car on weekends and drive them to the foot of the mountain. They would spend the morning hiking to the top and then return home to my grandmother for lunch.
“Ah Mah lao liao,” my grandmother says. Ah Mah is old now. I nod my head. This seems undeniable. “Ah Mah knows something happened with you and Daniel, that’s why you came home.”
“We got divorced,” I say.
She nods and sips. I wonder suddenly if she understands that word. Divorce: I don’t know how to say it in Hokkien.
“We aren’t married anymore, Ah Mah.”
She’s silent, digesting this fact. I wait for her to speak again but she doesn’t. The silence settles between us and makes itself comfortable.
When he met my grandmother my grandfather was almost forty years old. A customs officer, he had spent his early career being posted to different towns across Malaya, and it was hard to find a wife who would agree to that sort of life. But on his final posting he was sent to Changlun, a small town near the border of Thailand. He and his fellow officers were given rooms in the town above some shop lots. The second-floor rooms overlooked a small courtyard in which stood a stone bench and pots of flowering bougainvillea and ixora. My grandfather was in his room one evening when he heard female voices in the courtyard. He looked out and saw my grandmother sitting on the bench with some of her friends. She had fair skin and a long braid that hung to her waist, but it was her high wide forehead that drew him to her. He used to say that it gave her face a peaceful look. Later he found out she was the daughter of the town’s fabric merchant and that she was half Thai, her mother having been brought over from Hat Yai to become a merchant’s third wife. By the year’s end, they were married. They had four children, the youngest of whom was my mother.
Full night has fallen while my grandmother and I have been sitting on the veranda. Now the air is cooling down, and the bullfrogs and cicadas are starting up their symphony. Through the open doors behind me comes the scent of sandalwood, my mother’s evening prayers: three lit joss sticks, one for the goddess of mercy, one for the sky god, and one for the land deity. I know what she asks for every day: my happiness, my continued protection, good health for everyone in the family.
My grandmother yawns. She gets up from her chair, straightening one vertebra at a time. “Hoh khun,” she says. She pats my shoulder briefly before going inside.
“Goodnight, Ah Mah.”
After she goes in, I sit there for a while, listening. Outside the gate a streetlamp hugs itself in a circle of yellow light. The overgrown lalang grass by the side of the road dips and bobs in the breeze.
I head to my room, find my trainers, and return downstairs. My mother is snapping string beans in the living room, watching a Hong Kong TVB drama. Her eyes do not waver from the screen as she snaps the string off each bean and tosses it into a wire basket. When I sit down to put on my socks and shoes, my mother throws me a sideways glance and frowns.
“Where are you going?”
“Just out for a run.”
“Aiya, so late at night already go and run for what? Crazy ah. Later someone rob you then how?”
“Ma, you and I are just about the only people in this town under the age of eighty. Who’s going to rob me? Old Uncle Soon Yik from the sundry shop? Decrepit Uncle Guna from next door?”
“Choi, touch wood! Don’t say things like that, you never know, okay. Dangerous for a girl to go out so late at night. Pantang also. What if something follows you home? This kind of jungle-jungle area you don’t know what sort of things are lurking there.”
This gives me pause. I don’t believe in ghosts, obviously. But the jungle can be creepy, and I know what the old people say. Don’t roam around after dark lest something follow you home. Don’t leave your fingernail clippings around; someone could use them to make gong tau. Don’t sing in the kitchen or you’ll marry an old man.
I shake my head. “Nothing’s going to follow me home, Ma. I’m just going down the road.” I leave before she can say anything else. The cantankerous sound of television Cantonese follows me down the driveway. I pull the metal gate close behind me and set off down the street.
The night air is clammy the way it gets near the jungle or the mountains. I breathe deep, glad to be here, away from the street noise of Sydney, the alienating elegance of the Queen Victoria building, the looming arc of the harbor bridge. Here, there is none of that. There are only the familiar low houses and the beat of my trainers on the ground, thudding down the spaces between the street lamps. Light and dark, light and dark.
The day I met Daniel, I had also been running. I was late for my last class of the day, Financial Accounting Theory, and as I raced down the hallway I saw a boy stooping at a water fountain. He straightened just as I passed and grinned at me, wiping away droplets of water with the back of his hand. He had dark hair and dark eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses. His skin was pale, as if he hadn’t caught any of the summer sun we’d been having. He was only a little taller than me and, that day by the water fountain, his backpack seemed enormous on his wiry frame.
I slid into a seat in the back row and he came in a minute later, swinging his backpack onto the floor and taking the seat next to me. All that late afternoon I was aware of his proximity, of his long fingers dancing across his laptop. When class was over we walked off-campus to get bubble tea. I had not dated much and had certainly never been in love and so, as we talked outside the bubble tea cafe, I was unaware that I was noticing things about him the way you notice things about a person you think you might fall in love with.
He was the son of Greek immigrants; he had grown up on the north side of Sydney; he had attended an all-boys high school; he loved to ski and snowboard; he hated golf; he watched footy only desultorily. He had the grace of someone to whom things had always come easily, for whom the stars and planets had always aligned. As he raised his tea, I noticed that his horn-rimmed glasses sat on a nose that was high and straight, almost delicate, and that he spoke in a voice so low that at times I had to strain to hear. There was something measured about him, as if he naturally calibrated each thought and word and action, and I understood that the grin he had flashed me by the water fountain had been no common occurrence but rather an expression of special favor.
When, six months after we started dating, he brought me home to meet his parents in one of Sydney’s waterside suburbs, I was surprised by the size of their house, its white colonnades and soaring lines. It sat on the lawn like an immaculately decorated wedding cake. Daniel’s father was a property developer, a cool and distant presence at the dinner table. He excused himself early on to take a business call and his seat was left empty while Daniel’s mother asked me about Malaysia and my family. When I told her that my father had died when I was a small child, she hugged me close and, in a muted, pleasant tone not unlike her son’s, said that she was sorry to hear that, and that it was a pity. She smelled of good perfume and she had dressed up for dinner. “It’s important for children to know their parents,” she said thoughtfully, her eyes resting on the empty seat at the head of the table. “It provides some form of continuity.”
On the way home, Daniel seemed pleased that his mother had liked me, and I sensed that some sort of final obstacle had been removed. A few months later, just after we graduated, he proposed.
The house is dark when I return, the TV turned off, no sign of my mother or her beans. I creep up the staircase and see light spilling out on to the wooden landing. I peek in as I pass my mother’s room. She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, shrouded in a pink mosquito net. She looks up and sees me just as I’m about to tiptoe past to my room. “Girl, come in here for a while.”
“But I’m all sweaty.”
“Never mind, just for a while only. Ma wants to talk to you. Serious things.”
I know from experience that ‘serious things’ can mean anything from whether I’m taking the right vitamins to whether I’m going to move home permanently. I go in and sit on the edge of her bed, throwing the mosquito net over me. It casts a slightly pink glow on my mother’s face, still moist from her face cream. She’s fingering a small triangle of yellow paper, tightly folded and printed all over with red markings. It’s a fu, a Taoist paper talisman.
“Here,” she says. “Put this underneath your pillow tonight. Yesterday Ah Mah and I went to the temple to ask for blessings for you. We also bought some pomelo and lime leaves, so tomorrow you bathe in it, okay? Wash away all your bad luck.”
“Ma, you know I don’t believe in these things.” I know it’s a peace offering but I feel it’s a little cowardly to blame a failed marriage on bad luck. Karma played no role in my decision to dismantle my marriage.
“Believe or don’t believe, never mind. Just follow only.”
I look at the yellow triangle in my hand. “Okay.”
My mother sighs and leans back against her pillow. “All this divorce-divorce thing, very hard for me and your Ah Mah to understand, you know. We are not like your generation. When I married your father, I never thought that one day you could just become un-married like that. I mean, married means married what. For life, isn’t it? But see now, Ma still has to go to temple to get fu for you.”
Again, I struggle to see the connections in my mother’s logic, but I keep quiet this time, running my fingers over the hard edges of the triangle, feeling the firmness with which the fu has been folded tightly into itself.
“Never mind, girl. Late already. You should bathe and then go to sleep, okay? Good night. Turn off the lights for Ma on your way out, okay?”
As I leave the room I look back. My mother is arranging the blanket around her and tucking the ends of her mosquito net underneath her mattress. Already she has dismissed the entire matter as the day’s work done. Her daughter is safely home and fed and within scolding distance. A protection charm has been procured. The string beans readied for tomorrow’s lunch. Her daughter’s divorce finalized, the daughter poised to move on.
That night I have trouble falling asleep. I toss and turn, listening to my mother’s snores through the wooden walls that separate us, the rhythm well-remembered from when I was a child and we shared a rented room near the school where my mother worked as an admin assistant after my father died.
My parents had known each other as teenagers. My father was born in another town, but when his parents were killed in a car accident he and his siblings were distributed among their relatives. My father came to live with an aunt here in my mother’s hometown. He was fifteen, my mother thirteen. They didn’t get married until they were in their late twenties, when they reconnected during a trip back home. My mother had me several years after. I never asked but I had the impression that it had been a struggle for her to conceive.
When I was four my father died of a swift moving cancer. I wonder if my mother’s initial difficulty accepting my divorce stemmed from a kind of resentment at her own husband’s having been taken so early, if she thought that I was throwing away the kind of love that she misses every day.
At last I give up trying to sleep. I stick my hand underneath my pillow, feeling a childish pleasure at the sudden coolness, and bring out the fu. In the moonlight the red markings stand out clearly. I put it back beneath the pillow and sit up.
The house is not quite dark. Moonlight casts familiar shadows. I creep downstairs and head for the storeroom behind the kitchen. Behind dusty stacks of canned lychees and tinned curry chicken, I find hanging against the wall a long flattish case made of pale wood. When I open it, my grandfather’s old hunting rifle catches the moonlight, looking as if it had been polished only yesterday. I know nothing about firearms and have a vague notion that it must be illegal for this one to be here in my grandmother’s storeroom, unlicensed. But disassembled and nestled in its case, the rifle does not resemble a weapon. Instead, it looks like a piece of art, an object of harmless beauty. I touch it carefully, imagining that the last time it was handled was the day my grandfather killed the baby slow loris.
Because my grandfather married fairly late, he was an old man by the time my mother grew up, and even older by the time I left home to finish college in Sydney. When I think about him, my memories coalesce into a single image: his frail figure in a plastic string chair in the living room, the clean white singlet he wore hanging off his angular frame, a pattern of liver spots covering his skin. Because of their discrepancy in age, my grandmother was relatively young when my grandfather’s memories began falling out of step and he started to forget the names of his children, the order of the years. And because they were both of a generation that did not demonstrate love, I never saw them touch, or show affection of any kind, or even speak of it. But every evening my grandfather sat on the veranda and waited for my grandmother to finish her evening chores so that he could make her a cup of tea.
I used to watch them sometimes, on visits home. They would sit with their backs to the house, the low wooden table between them. My grandfather would rinse the teapot carefully with hot water and spoon the dried tea leaves into it. More hot water would go into the pot and after a while he would hand the cup gently to my grandmother. He would wait for her sigh of approval before taking up his own cup, settling back to enjoy the evening. It occurred to me on those occasions, watching them, that love—something which I ordinarily didn’t give much thought to—was perhaps worth aspiring to after all.
I replace the rifle and hang the case back up. I pour myself a glass of water and climb the stairs to my room. It’s not until I’m back in bed that I realize that both the rifle and its case, alone among all the forgotten items in my grandmother’s storeroom, were completely dust-free, looked completely cared-for.
The next morning I wake up early, shivering a little in the pre-dawn darkness as the azan floats in through my windows from the nearby mosque. I make some instant coffee in the kitchen, decant it into a travel mug, and leave a note to my mother on the fridge.
The trail up to the peak of Gunung Rindu lies just off the main road, a narrow path hemmed in on both sides by rattan trees and hanging lianas. The ground is pebbly and there’s an occasional fallen tree trunk to climb over but otherwise the path is clear.
There is a pale light now in the sky and the rainforest around me is dew-wet and there are animals calling to each other. I think briefly about snakes but dismiss the fear. Leeches are a more realistic worry. Every few paces I see a cigarette butt or two on the ground and think about bushfire warnings in Australia. There’s a movement in the undergrowth to my left and I pause. It’s a lone monkey, silky fur and liquid eyes and human-like fingers. It regards me for a while and then, when I move, turns and scales the nearest tree, tail swinging impudently behind it. As the trail gets steeper, I pull myself along with the help of guide ropes fixed between the trees. I’m panting now, the back of my shirt soaked in humidity as much as it is in perspiration.
All around me the jungle flows and calls to itself. My grandfather had loved the rainforest. He had traveled the length and breadth of the peninsula, tramped all across the Titiwangsa Range, forded rivers and pushed aside foliage, held his breath as he hunted wild boar and tapir and mouse deer. As I push deeper into the jungle and higher up the mountain, I imagine the exhilaration he must have felt, the total stillness with which he’d have had to hold himself as he sighted his rifle and squeezed the trigger, bringing down some creature as beautiful as it was powerful as it was lost.
The day I told my mother that Daniel and I were filing for divorce, she stayed quiet on the phone for a long time. “Why?” she finally asked.
“I’m unhappy,” I said. I knew this was not enough for her, but I didn’t know what else to say. Perhaps if I had searched hard enough I could have found the words to tell her about it. The slow, horrifying crystallization of knowledge within you that what you thought was love was merely the veneer of it, and that you didn’t want it, any of it, after all. That it wasn’t enough to carry you through your days. That you knew in the tiniest, most essential core of your heart that there would be no growing old with this man, no evenings of drinking tea on the veranda, no listening to the clamor of grandchildren, no dusting his hunting rifle long after he was gone.
It had happened one night while we were having dinner at an Italian restaurant. As the waiter led us to a table on the patio, the late summer dusk was falling over the city. Daniel ordered for the both of us, as he always did. Halfway through our pizzas, I looked up and saw an elderly lady making her way down the street. She wore a thick cable-knit cardigan over her sari, even though the night was warm, and she carried a string bag that pooled towards the ground with the weight of oranges. She walked slowly, threading her way along the crowded pavement. At the top of the street, near where we sat, an old man turned to her. He smiled and took the string bag from her and they continued walking down the street together, her salt-and-pepper braid swaying gently as he guided her carefully by the elbow.
“Anna?”
The restaurant snapped back into focus and I found myself looking into Daniel’s puzzled face. I realized then that I had been speaking to him, had in fact been in mid-sentence when I had stopped to stare at the husband and wife.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
I began to tell him, but I couldn’t finish my sentence. My thoughts seemed disordered and my tongue would not work. The restaurant had suddenly become a painful place to be.
Daniel glanced at the waiter and the man hurried off, returning with a glass of icy water that I drank until my stomach cramped. Daniel watched me carefully, almost warily, as if he knew in that moment what I was going to say, as if he had been anticipating it through these months of missed signals and silences, as if, that night in the Italian restaurant, he could see, as I did, the months that would follow, that would see us spinning away from one another, falling out of each other’s orbit, in that exhausting dance they call divorce.
For the next two hours I make my ascent up the mountain and then, just as the last of the cool morning fades away, I reach the peak, a plateau dotted with grey rocks and littered with cigarette butts. The rock I sit on is already uncomfortably warm as I settle down to find my grandmother’s house among the sea of corrugated zinc roofs.
The town lies spread out before me. The people are stirring, cars making their way down to the market where old aunties will poke at the fish and buy soybean milk ladled from a metal vat straight into their containers. I can see the town’s main road and I know that somewhere on it, Uncle Soon Yik will be opening up his sundry shop, and I smile as I remember the conversation I had with my mother last night. I miss her suddenly, urgently, though she is not far anymore, just down there under one of many roofs below. I think about my grandfather shooting the baby slow loris because he had mistaken one thing for another, because sometimes, in the dark, it is not possible to distinguish the true shapes of things. I think about my mother under her mosquito net, proffering a tiny yellow triangle that is supposed to keep me safe. But which one of us is ever safe?
I sit until the heat grows unbearable and until I see the pinprick figure of my mother come out on to the porch for her morning calisthenics. I think of all my possessions in storage lockers in Sydney and of the warmth that awaits me here. Before I leave, I pull the yellow fu from my pocket and tuck it underneath the rock I’ve been sitting on. Then I turn my attention away from the town and make my way back down the mountain towards my grandmother’s house.
Leeyee Lim is a Malaysian-Chinese writer who currently lives and writes in Toronto. Her fiction has previously been published or is forthcoming in The Drum Literary Magazine, Necessary Fiction and the Master’s Review Anthology Volume IX. She taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
