She was six, maybe seven when she left on a steamboat. I have this image of what it looked like, pieced together from different accounts:
A girl with dark hair pulled back into a bun, standing in a narrow passageway on a steamship. She’s cradling a baby boy. In the background, their mother retches overboard.
I can’t affix many other details to the image. Sometimes I imagine plumes of gray steam rising from a steel funnel. Sometimes my eyeline drifts backward, to a crowd of others who are also poor, also sick. This morning, squinting through the blurry keyhole in my mind, I see the girl walk away from me, toward the deck. She ducks and squirrels her way between desperate adults as she holds her brother still. She makes it to the edge of the deck and gazes at the ocean. I look over her shoulder and see it too — water spreading in every direction. That great, crying feeling of expanse. I’m right behind her. I want her to say something, but she’s mute.
The past can’t be retrieved, even if it’s yours.
In 1922, a typhoon visited Guangdong. Local newspapers described violent, screaming winds and rain that formed “blinding walls of water.” As many as 100,000 people were killed. In the small city of Swatow, about a tenth of the population perished. The girl was born in this city in 1928. Most of Swatow, then, was still in shambles. China was in the middle of a civil war about to be disrupted by the arrival of Japanese imperialists. There was a huge port in Swatow, one of those forced open by the West after the opium wars a century before, and every week, ships jammed with migrants left, sailing toward the islands in Southeast Asia.
The girl’s father went first. In 1935, she followed. Her boat would have spent about a week traveling southward and westward before stopping at an island originally known in Malay as Sakijang (satu kijang — “one deer”) but anglicized by English idiots as St John’s. Ostensibly, all travelers who wanted to pass through or reach Malaya had to be quarantined on St John’s. In reality, first and second-class passengers were exempt, and only people like our girl, dark skin flaking from the sun, were made to stay on the island. They were checked for cholera, leprosy, and smallpox, and had their clothes fumigated by steam boilers.
On St John’s, the girl would have seen, for the first time, people unlike herself. Wealthy Muslim Malays returning from pilgrimage to Mecca. Merchants from Tamil Nadu. Sikh police transplanted by the British, dressed in navy blue uniforms and foot-high turbans. The girl would have had to navigate this new society. She’d have to learn that she was near the bottom of this hierarchy, which was why, on St John’s, she was quarantined in the same barracks as pigs and chickens.
I don’t know if she would have heard the word then but the British had a name for a place like St John’s: Lazaretto, from the Italian word Lazzaro, meaning beggar. This is itself drawn, of course, from the parable of Lazarus in the New Testament. How it goes is that there was a rich man and a beggar; the rich man lived richly until he died and was sent to hell while the beggar lived poorly until he died and was sent to heaven. Across interpretations, the story of Lazarus is meant to express the reversal of fortunes.
Till today, that’s still the promise of migration. People leave on the belief that traveling through space can bring them not only physically but spiritually somewhere else; that life can change on a dime, from down to up, hell to heaven. Though the modes of transport and the border controls have changed, this fantasy endures. Uprooting is still one of humanity’s favorite illusions.
I think of our girl at St John’s, one in a crowd of Lazzaros, in a strange holding area between her past and future. Her life is turning, turning, turning. I see her sitting with her legs pulled in close, looking up at the night sky. With everyone asleep and the air cool, there’s a sweet smell from the langsat trees on St John’s. She breathes in. Maybe she tells herself not to be afraid. Maybe she whispers, like I sometimes do, okay, okay, okay.
***
Once on the big island, our girl’s family moved into a shophouse by a pier. She never asked to go to school like her brothers but she begged her father several times to let her take language classes. Her argument hinged on the fact that there was a girl down the street who took lessons and was learning, slowly but surely, how to read and write. Our girl’s father adored her and later in his life, when he lost his mind, she was the one he still remembered and called for. When she asked in those shophouse days for the chance to learn, he always said patiently and lovingly — No.
War soon arrived for everyone, literate or not. Our girl was 14 when the Japanese came through Johor on their bicycles. She cut her hair short and learned to put soot on her face when soldiers made their rounds. She watched the older girls get whipped and she learned how to sleep under the noise of air raid sirens. A few years after the war ended, she married.
From here, in my mind, the story flattens. It thins out into a shallow, skipping thing because what it becomes is just one thing, a woman’s thing. She gave birth to seven children in 15 years. She wrecked her body in cyclical fashion: birthing, feeding, raising, repeat. And she worked and she worked — for free. Her country evolved around her and she lost ground. By instruction of her government, people started speaking in a language she didn’t understand. As more land was built up, transformed, developed, the places where a woman like her could go to understand and be understood shrank continuously so that by the time she was entering her golden years, mostly where she could be found was in her living room, on a varnished wooden chair, facing the television.
I remember from visiting when I was a girl that there would sometimes be a newspaper sitting on the waxy tablecloth, folded in half. She would thumb the corner of it as she listened to the sounds of people talking in languages she didn’t know. I didn’t realize until I was much older that she was only ever looking at the newspaper — looking, never reading, because, of course, she couldn’t.
***
I’ve been trying to figure out why I dwell so much on those first few years of her life; why it’s always that image of her on the steamship I want to see.
How I know her in reality is like this: seated, quiet and venerable, like a local Buddha. The girl I have in my mind is something more compelling: A flickering light. Something unusual; something free and daring. Before her life was shaped by the immovable social mores of her time, before she stepped into the role she was destined to play, she was a small child on a big ship. She held a baby like an inexplicable Madonna, erect on a vessel unmoored, leaving one theater of human drama for another.
I dwell on her because this girl seems most like my inheritance. I dwell on her also because she’s slippery. Language, time and space mean I can only sketch her out in my mind with the roughest strokes. I click through images of nineteenth century steamships leaving ports in China as though it’ll bring me closer. There’s a Dickinson poem I run through in my head when I imagine her on board:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses past the headlands
Into deep Eternity
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
We have no languages between us but she is mine as I am hers. She leaves and so do I. That girl, our girl on a steamship, holding a baby. I’m right behind her and I see what she sees. Will the others get it, do you think? Will the others know, as well as we do, this divine intoxication?
Rebecca Tan is a newspaper journalist based in Singapore who travels Southeast Asia.