A Yellow House Read online

  We found a quiet corner. Mama, pushing the stroller, was still somewhere on the path out of sight. I had never flown a kite.

  ‘How do we do it? Do you know?’ I asked Dad.

  He looked as if he didn’t know either, but would never admit it. ‘It’s been a while, but yes. You stand over there. Hold the kite, like this.’ He stretched out his hands to demonstrate. ‘Wait, no. I’ll hold it. Give it to me.’

  Reluctantly, I handed over the kite. ‘But I wanted to do it.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s why you need to hold the string. When I let go of the kite and say go, you need to run.’

  I looked around to find a space to run into. Mama had arrived and taken Chloe out of the stroller. She’d spread out a rug and now sat there sipping water, looking hot and flustered. I waved at her. ‘Are you joining us, Mama?’

  ‘Darling, let me cool down first. I had to push your sister up that hill.’ She looked at Dad meaningfully.

  Mama really looked like she needed a rest so I turned back to Dad, who was still holding the kite. Suddenly, he let it go. ‘Go!’ he shouted.

  What did I have to do again?

  ‘Run!’ Dad yelled, ‘You need to run, Maya!’

  I made some hesitant steps but now Dad yelled again. ‘No! Not now. It’s too late. Wait. Let’s try again.’

  He walked to where the kite lay on the floor and picked it up. Holding it above his head, he pushed it into the air and yelled ‘Go!’ again, and I tried to run. Concentrating on where I was going, I couldn’t see the kite flopping behind me, pulled along the rooftop like a dead dog. When Dad yelled ‘Stop!’ I looked behind me. The line had got tangled in the wheels of the stroller.

  Mama unpicked it. ‘You’re useless,’ she told Dad. ‘This is a woman’s job. Let me have a go.’

  She shoved Chloe into Dad’s arms, then turned to me. ‘Look at me when you run, Maya, and start earlier.’

  I tried looking at Mama, but walking backwards was slow and I almost stumbled over my own feet. The second time I bumped into Chloe, who had toddled into my path. Then, Mama and Dad tried together. Mama held the kite, Dad ran, and the kite went up. It flew for a few seconds, floundered, then tilted and dropped down.

  Mama looked from the kite to me. ‘Where’s Chloe?’ she yelled. ‘Maya, I told you to watch her!’

  I wanted to say, ‘No, you didn’t,’ but thought better of it. I looked behind me and at the far end of the field I saw a red dot, which could have been Chloe’s dress. I ran over and carried her back.

  Mama muttered under her breath, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Dad was trying to stay cheerful, but Mama was turning red under her hat, and it wasn’t from the sun.

  She had the beginnings of the Mamamonster about her, but instead of yelling out in the wind and the crowd, she seemed to scream on the inside. Her sunglasses protected me from her deadly looks.

  By now Dad was rolling up the string. He tossed the kite on top of the stroller and sat down. ‘Why can’t we ever act normally? We were just trying to have fun.’

  I thought Mama was going to implode. Then Chloe pulled the kite off the stroller by its tail.

  Mama jumped up. ‘Stop it, Chloe. You’ll break it.’ She looked at Dad, but didn’t scream. ‘Am I the only one looking after her?’

  I drank some water and looked up at the sky. It was full of kites. I opened my mouth and tasted the salty sea breeze blowing in. Hungry for the wind, I swallowed big gulps.

  Mama drank some water too. It seemed to cool her down. ‘Why don’t we ask someone for help? That guy?’ She pointed at a man a few yards away, who had an impressive array of three different kites up in the sky. One was the giant octopus we’d seen from the parking lot.

  Dad said, insulted, ‘No, we’ll do it, won’t we, Maya?’

  Mama put Chloe in the stroller. ‘I’ll take her for a walk, see if I can get her asleep.’

  After three attempts, Dad and I had the kite up in the air, at least five metres. I ran as fast as I could. Then I felt the line snag. I pulled harder until I heard shouting.

  It was the man from the octopus kite. ‘Hey, girl, your kite and my kite langar. What you do?’ Looking up, I realised my kite was strung around the string of the octopus. Dad came running, full of apologies.

  ‘Give me that string lah.’

  The man snatched it from my hand. He walked up and down, fiddling, and suddenly the kite flew free. It went high up, settling under the octopus.

  The man grinned. ‘You need to practise lah. You do it all wrong.’

  Dad grinned uncomfortably. The man pulled in the kite, elbow by elbow of string.

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed. It had finally been up! ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘We’ll get it back up. I’ll show you. I’ll hold it, you take this.’

  He handed me the end of the string, took Dad by the arm, and walked the other way. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You need to go downwind. He pointed in the sky. ‘The wind, where does it come from?’

  Dad looked around, uncertain. I opened my mouth again and tasted the wind. ‘That way,’ I pointed.

  ‘Correct,’ the man laughed, his thumb up.

  ‘So I stand that way. No need to run. You just pull gently. Pull, let go, then pull again. No hurry.’

  He let go and I pulled. ‘Right. Just let go and pull, hand over hand.’

  I felt the kite tug the string. It was going up!

  I tugged back, and slowly the kite soared. ‘Not too fast, be patient,’ the man warned me. ‘Now, you can walk. And just ease out the string, so it can get higher.’

  I looked at Dad proudly, and he grinned.

  ‘Look, Mama, I’m flying the kite!’

  Mama, sat next to the stroller with a sleeping Chloe, looked up from her phone and smiled too. ‘See, when you ask for help you get it.’ She jumped up. ‘Wait, stay there. This is an amazing shot.’

  Behind us was the skyline, and in the air above me, all the kites – including my yellow butterfly with the green tail. In spite of the string, or perhaps because of it, the kite flew happy and free. I felt like I flew too, but when I turned my head to smile at Mama’s phone, the pressure dropped from the string. ‘Look out!’ Dad yelled. ‘Keep walking.’ Then, ‘Why is everything a photo for you? Just learn to enjoy,’ he hissed at Mama.

  I ran, and the kite soared again. Mama ignored Dad and gave me a thumbs up and a big smile.

  We flew the butterfly some more. Once it came down, and Mama and I managed to get it up again together. Afterwards we walked back to where we could see clouds of fragrant smoke billowing from the coal fires where rows of satay were being roasted. Dad ordered fifty sticks, and we ate till we burst. I thought that any country that had satay like this not only worked, but had to be the best in the world.

  When we were almost home, Mama said, looking at her phone. ‘That photo got seventy-six likes already! Wasn’t it an amazing afternoon?’

  Dad and I said nothing. Chloe slept.

  22

  Surprisingly, school was getting better. Bus rides were still bad – Jenny and Meena alternating snide cockroach remarks with ignoring me – but the rest of the day was ok. In my class people treated me almost like normal.

  Although my own life was bordering on boring, terrible things were happening to other people. You would think getting involved in such misery would make a person feel worse, but I experienced the opposite. Even if we could help an aunty only a little – by offering a listening ear, a shoulder to lean on and, where we could, some straightforward advice – I could see some of the strain leaving her face. And every time we made someone else feel better, I felt a little better too. And when I felt better in myself, people at school seemed to treat me better. It was like a spiral that started so deep down, in such shitty stuff, that there was no way for it to go but up.

  Not that the stories we heard didn’t affect me. Often I lay in bed at night mulling them over in my head, trying to understand why these employers did
what they did. I understood them even less than I did my own mother.

  Aunty M was turning into an expert in domestic worker issues. Was she really a busybody? The helpdesk people had told her off for dealing with cases on her own. She told me about it and said she’d do better, stop meddling outside work. But she didn’t. The aunties kept calling her.

  ‘When they ask for help, how can I not give it?’ she asked, raising her hands skywards. I agreed. ‘And you, you are such a good helper.’

  We had become closer than ever. It was as if we’d both realised we got along best when we talked about other people, not ourselves. I didn’t mention Nurul again. And Aunty M never mentioned Jenny.

  When we visited others, my role was mostly to sit and listen. Now and again, though, I pitched in. I was better than Aunty M at remembering all the rules, the details of what had been paid, by whom, what was said, who did what. Aunty M could mix things up. She would look at me, checking that she’d got her facts right. I would make notes in my red notebook – not the Hello Kitty one; that was so childish – but a new one I’d picked specially. If we revisited someone, I’d look up the details beforehand and share them with Aunty M.

  We now knew everything about deductions, the payments that the domestic workers – Aunty M and I had learned not to call them the derogative name maid – had to pay when they started a job. Some agencies called it a loan, or savings, or any other name to make it sound nicer. The government only allowed the agencies to ask for two months of recruitment fees on a two-year contract, so they had to be creative in order to charge much more. When we visited someone and it was about salary, or she hadn’t been in Singapore that long, I tried to make a summary of the salary she’d received. Often it took a while to get the numbers straight. The aunties had no idea how to manage their finances. If they did get their salary, many sent all of it straight to their home country.

  ‘Write down when you get your salary each month, when and how much,’ Aunty M would exclaim. ‘How can you say your employer is not paying you, if you don’t know what they give you?’

  Many of the women who called for help had only been in Singapore a few months, and hadn’t finished paying off the loan. But sometimes they weren’t even sure how much they’d been charged and how much they still owed. My notebook would be full of scribbled numbers and question marks. Debt, contract, transfer, investment, deductions, remittance, agents; I wrote the words in my little notebook. Whenever a new one came up I didn’t understand, I would ask Aunty M for an explanation. Or even Mama or Dad, pretending it was for school. Mama was quite proud that I’d taken an interest in economics, and I didn’t correct her.

  The stories from Aunty M’s helpdesk piled up: stories about woman having their hair cut off by jealous ma’ams; employers hitting women; even one where an employer let her kids hit the maid while she looked on. The realisation that adults could bully other adults scared the hell out of me.

  Sri was still in the shelter. Another couple of months had passed without any progress on her case. After the lie detector test, she hadn’t heard from the police again. The helpdesk people said they were gathering all the evidence and would soon decide whether they would press charges against her employers. Sri wasn’t sure what she was hoping for now. She mainly wanted to go home. If the police decided to press charges, her employers might get punished, but Sri feared that justice would come at a cost. If the case went ahead, Sri was the main witness and wouldn’t be able to leave the country until it was over. She had made friends in the shelter that had been stuck in Singapore for years, as court proceedings and appeals dragged on and on. If they got permission from the police they could work under a temporary job scheme, but they weren’t all brave enough to do so. Nor was it easy to find an employer. Some women got financial compensation for their long wait without income, but many did not. How much was justice worth to Sri? And could her family in Indonesia hold on that long without her sending any cash?

  She struggled to understand what was happening, even with her improved English. Many times she begged Aunty M for help to stop the case, to cancel the charges. Aunty M couldn’t get her to understand that that was the prosecutors’ call, as it was a criminal case. It was out of Sri’s hands now.

  Aunty M was worried about Sri; she said she was getting depressed. She had made a good friend at the shelter, but sunk in silence again when that friend went back to Indonesia. There was nothing anyone could do but wait.

  I started to think I needed to become a lawyer when I grew up. I’d speed things up. But Aunty M said I was only a little girl, and had no understanding of how things worked in the world of courts and lawyers. She became bossy. When she was like that, I felt much tinier than ten.

  The stories we heard at the playground or our house visits weren’t as bad as Sri’s and her friends’ in the shelter, but there were so many of them. Domestic workers not getting enough sleep, having to sleep in a living room where teenage sons played computer games all night, being called stupid over and over again, taking extra deductions from their salary as punishment, not getting paid at all, or too late, being made to cook for a catering business, days off that were promised but not given. Women having to do complicated nursing jobs they weren’t trained to do, then getting told off when they didn’t do them properly.

  I did wonder sometimes about PoPo, and her old Singapore. She had let slip things about cruelty, about the war; yet to me her version of Singapore seemed a lot friendlier than mine. Had people been nicer in the past? I had some inkling there could be cracks in the picture, that reality wasn’t black and white like an old photograph.

  PoPo had told me about Ah Feng, the old Chinese woman who looked after her when she was little, and I wondered whether she had been anything like my aunties. Had she left a husband and kids behind? Had she gone back to China after PoPo was big enough to look after herself? Would Mama know? Could I ask her without making her sad?

  One day, when Mama was in a particularly good mood, I asked. Mama reacted very differently from what I’d expected. She beamed. ‘Ah Feng, PoPo’s old maid, yes. Did you know, I met her once? She must have been close to ninety then. She stayed in this old people’s home, paid for by the uncles. They loved her. In those days, servants were part of the family. Amahs, they were called.’

  ‘Amah? Like in grandmother?’ I asked.

  ‘No, that’s Ah Mah. Some still call their maids that, amah, or ayah. Ah Feng was sharp as a nail, even at that age. A feminist avant la lettre.’

  I didn’t get it, and looked blankly at Mama.

  ‘A feminist is someone who wants equal rights for women. Before, women were supposed to get married, have kids, do the housework. But a feminist thinks that women can work, have a career, choose their own life, make their own decisions.’

  ‘Like you?’ I said.

  Mama was overjoyed. ‘Yes exactly, smart one. And you too.’

  Me? I wasn’t so sure. ‘And Aunty M?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose yes, Aunty M too. She took responsibility for her life in her own hands.’

  ‘But she does housework.’

  ‘You can do housework and still be a feminist. She makes money, right? Feminism is about financial independence. About women being able to make their own money. Having your own money makes you free.’

  Oh joy. We were back on the old theme, money. Housework was a job if it made you money. I didn’t want to be a feminist now, even if I liked the idea of being able to make my own choices, unlike children and domestic workers. As always, money ruined everything.

  ‘So why was Ah Feng a feminist?’ I was surprised that Mama had got excited about an old maid, even if she was a feminist.

  ‘In university I wrote a paper on early Chinese feminism; let me see if I can find it. I interviewed Ah Feng for it.’

  Mama went up to her room and came back with a thin binder. ‘Here.’

  We pored over the words together. There were a lot.

  ‘Wait, you sit down, I’ll read ou
t the highlights.’ Mama reclined in her chair and leafed through the binder. ‘Ah Feng was born in the Pearl River Delta, in Guangdong province, early in the century, but she didn’t know exactly when. Her family were silk farmers. Then, in the nineteen twenties, the Great Depression hit.’

  She looked up from the pages. ‘That meant that all over the world businesses crashed and people lost their jobs. People stopped buying expensive silks.’

  She flipped through the pages again. ‘Ah, here. Women in the delta traditionally had a high level of freedom and autonomy. Due to a shortage of men, female labour was required at farms. Unmarried women lived together in girls’ houses, where they formed sisterhoods with fellow lodgers.’

  Ok, I had not understood a single word. Mama looked up from the paper to explain. ‘They couldn’t just leave the women at home to do the housework. They needed them on the fields. And the ones that did get married wanted to keep some of those freedoms. But many others refused to get married. They stayed together in these sisterhoods. Ah Feng didn’t like men.’ Mama laughed. ‘She felt they were more trouble than they were worth.’

  That sounded a bit like Mary Grace.

  ‘Instead of a wedding they did a special hairdressing ceremony to show they were bound to their sisters. This way, they were allowed to get a job that paid wages. Some people say that before, women didn’t work. But that’s nonsense. They worked very hard. They just didn’t get paid for it.’

  ‘So Ah Feng got married to her friends, instead of to a guy?’ I giggled.

  Mama nodded again. ‘Yes, something like that. She told me she had seen a lot of bad marriages, and didn’t see the point.’