kwananntan

[kwananntan]

I sieve the syrup through the gaps between my teeth as if I am rinsing my mouth. Fine tendrils like waves breaking against a shore of enamel. Mum says don’t play with your food, but it’s a habit, making sure each strand permeates every inch of my mouth. Swiftlets’ spit is brittle, translucent, painstakingly delicate.  Slightly yellowed, like the drool on my pillowcase and the stains that can never be erased from the cotton underneath. Think back to the apothecary in the Chinese medicine shop handling all those nests shaped like open mouths, gloved fingers leaving smaller finger-mouths on the surface. When the swiftlet builds up to the act—is it a long roll at the back of its throat, a trill crescendoing to release? Or does it wait patiently, hoarding, like a tap trickling drops into a basin? When I was younger, we used to hawk spittle onto passersby under my aunt’s low-rise flat, an art that required you to make the drops just right. Too large and they caught you right away, hurling curses and threats to tell our parents, but other times the wind caught your spittle and landed so perfectly that we saw people look up while we crouched behind metal railings, searching for rain.

‘Spit’, published in the inaugural issue of Honey Literary

[kwananntan]

Steamboat

The weekend my cousin got into the University of Edinburgh, our entire family was invited to Big Uncle and Aunt’s house for a steamboat dinner. This invitation was met with joy and excitement (on the part of my two younger twin brothers), but also dismay and dread (in the secret, but perhaps not innermost thoughts of Ma and I).

As we ascended the glass elevator that led to my uncle and aunt’s fancy apartment in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Ma lamented the fact that she had such an incapable daughter, and warned my brothers not to follow my example, but to instead make sure that they looked up to and learned from my cousin. As usual, I pretended not to listen, while my younger brothers were too busy arguing about who had better aim and was more likely to hit a passerby on the ground with a mouthful of spit. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but I had long learned to block my ears off from the words that spilled from Ma’s mouth like heavy rain during a period of haze. They left their oily-grey smoke trails on my skin, and I was so saturated with them I could sometimes tell what she was going to say before she said it.

Not for the first time that day, I wondered how different things would have been at these family gatherings if Ba had not abandoned us nearly ten years ago, and left Ma to bend over backwards to please her stuck-up family. We were so afraid of any shame that some of my more distant relatives did not even know that Ma was divorced—or pretended not to know. They assumed our father was always on a badly-timed business trip whenever we had to meet them. You must be so lucky to have a father that works so hard for you! They would say, while I would only grit my teeth and smile sheepishly, resenting my mother for putting us in this position. For all we knew, Ba was very well dead by now, or raising a mirror image of our family, one that was smarter and prettier and richer than ours.

‘Ah John, congratulations! We are all so proud of you. First in the family to go to university!’ Ma said, without a trace of resentment.

When my cousin opened the door, Ma handed him an ang pao and smiled sweetly, a rare event that would only occur five times across my lifetime, and directed to me only once, on the day I got married. She seemed to have conveniently forgotten the fact that I was already in a local university, having started on the January-December calendar rather than the Western one. Still, it didn’t count, since it was just a polytechnic. For many people, this didn’t seem like something to be proud of––it was a useful degree, but not as glamorous as the degrees from the exotic West. Never mind that we didn’t have the money for me to go overseas—it still somehow counted as a failing on my part.

For all his parents’ money, I was thankful that at least my cousin had some manners, and never rubbed anything in my face while we were growing up. The ang pao disappeared into his back pocket, and was tucked underneath his chequered shirt.

‘Come in, come in!’ Big Uncle boomed in Mandarin, face already red from early celebration, a sweating bottle of Tiger beer in his hand. ‘Why still standing in the doorway? No need to be polite!’

We crowded in and dutifully recited a roll call of greetings, from eldest to youngest relative. My Po Po was still in the living room catching the last few minutes of a Hokkien drama that never seemed to end. She was a small, bird-boned lady that always had her silver hair pulled back in a severe bun. Po Po also had perfect posture, regardless of whatever situation she was in––a trait that unfortunately not a single one of her children and grandchildren had. When I glanced at the screen, three characters were lost in an intense but circular argument about the identity of a child, eyes wide and earnest, as if this was the first time in the drama this had happened. Anyone who was able to maintain such dedication to their character over the course of five hundred or more episodes truly deserved an Oscar.

Po Po smiled when she saw us approach, flashing a full set of false teeth. I got a polite nod, while the twins got warmer hugs and head pats, my grandmother asking why they seemed to get thinner and thinner every time she saw them. She shook her head disappointingly at Ma, whose own lips thinned in response as she struggled to hold back a rude response to her mother.

Big Uncle and Aunt’s house had always seemed so big when I was a child. It was certainly expensive—Big Uncle was a businessman who had gotten lucky in the property development market, and was the more successful sibling on Ma’s side of the family. Their family could afford expensive trips to Europe, good international schools, and luxury cars. Meanwhile, it was a treat for our family if we occasionally got to take a road trip down to Penang or Melaka, local haunts which were more food adventures than life-changing cultural experiences. Big Aunt had once given me a small souvenir from Paris, a camera obscura with a tiny pinhole that gave me a panoramic view of the courtyards of the Louvre. That whole year, I nearly ruined my eyesight by squinting through the tiny thing to capture every detail, dreaming endlessly of walking those halls, escaping the moist heat of the tropics.  

My Big Aunt was busy in the kitchen, preparing the cooked and raw ingredients that would make up our family steamboat. Every inch of the kitchen counter was covered in dishes, and my stomach grumbled at the sight. She was the perfect stay at home mum and wife. Every time we visited, I couldn’t help but marvel at how immaculate the kitchen was, or how artfully yet another room renovation had been done. While my mother used Big Aunt’s life of leisure as the reason everything she did looked so perfectly put together all the time, I secretly thought that my Big Aunt had just never known bitterness, and so she couldn’t imagine any bitterness in the lives of others.

‘Mei-ah, how’s school?’ She asked, while arranging cloud-coloured, deveined prawns on a plate. They were so large that she was able to build them up into a small Jenga tower, black eyes spilling out of their heads. I replied that everything was fine, and nothing was too hard yet.

She turned off the bubbling pot of broth on the stove. ‘Your mother must be so happy that you’re living close by,’ she continued. ‘Xin tong ah, when I think about John going to Edinburgh. My big boy, all grown up now! I don’t know how I’m going to cope when the youngest will have to go too.’

I was handed a plate of fish bladders and beancurd to bring to the dining room, as she followed behind with four stacks of thinly cut shabu-shabu meat. In a matter of minutes, the spread was transferred from kitchen to table, with the huge steamboat pot taking the place of pride atop a portable electric hot plate.

‘Lai chi ah!’ Big Aunt called out loudly to everyone.

Steamboat is a meal that both embodies unity while promoting bitter divisiveness. The order of ingredients that go in are a hotly contested topic, and there is only as much space as the pot allows, so for hungry stomachs, it’s important that the things they like most go in first.

Meat first—for Ma and Big Uncle, who were rarely in accord on anything. Big Aunt and Po Po protested, saying that the vegetables cooked slower, and were needed to counteract the heatiness of the steamboat’s pork broth. The twins and our younger cousin tore their eyes away from their computer games and came over to add their noisy voices to the fray, calling out for meatballs stuffed with cheese and crab-sticks to be thrown in. Big Aunt lamented the fact that they didn’t have a pot with a divider in the center, so that we could have different soups and broths.

Eventually, all eyes turned to John who had already started on the side dish of fried dumplings while the adults bickered.

‘I like both meat and vegetables,’ he said. ‘But the vegetables do take longer to cook, so we should just leave them in while the broth boils. When everything is hot enough we can just dip the meat in and cook it instantly, so no one has to wait for anything.’

It was the obvious solution, but no one ever wanted to compromise in the beginning. The ingredients went in: huge leaves of Chinese cabbage that would shrink down as they were boiled, local Kai Lan that Big Aunt swore was a hundred percent organic, then some meat and fish balls to please the children. Ma and Big Uncle dipped in meat with their chopsticks directly into the boiling broth, and then into the mixture of soy sauce and chilli flakes in the smaller dishes in front of them.

We ate peacefully, as the talk turned to politics. Big Uncle laughed about another Malaysian politician’s alleged sex tape, while Big Aunt scolded him and said there were children at the table. Another corruption scandal. One of our relatives working in the government civil service had mentioned something or other to Big Uncle, ensuring that the rumours would spread further and further through the country until even primary school children had worked the words into their schoolyard games. Ma asked John about university—where was he going to live, and who was going to help him move all his things? Then to our younger cousin—would he miss his older brother? He shrugged in response, mouth full of food.

John hadn’t just gotten into a university overseas, but he was going to be the first doctor in our family. Big Uncle often boasted that if Po Po and Gong Gong had been rich enough to send him overseas, he would have been able to be a doctor too, and wouldn’t have had to start working at such a young age. I couldn’t think of a worse profession for him—with his red face and furrowed brows, staring down a patient as they tried to explain their symptoms. He was a much better businessman, with the courage to strong arm people into giving him what he wanted. John would probably be a good doctor. Luckily, he had inherited Big Aunt’s patience and thoughtful eyes, and I had never seen him frustrated or upset before.

Continue reading at Joyland

[kwananntan]

Oracle

In three of her past lives, Ma had apparently been a jade ornament hanging off the silken clothes of a prized concubine, the muse for one of the famous classical gardens created by Ji Cheng in Suzhou, and a 1920s Shanghai shi dai qu songstress who, upon learning she would never sing again after an assault by a jealous ex-lover, tragically succumbed to an opium overdose.

It wasn’t that she remembered any of those past lives in any kind of significant detail. It didn’t even matter that she couldn’t point out Suzhou on a map of China or that she hated jazz. She believed in each past life with such passion and devotion that it very nearly convinced me, but less so Ba, who tolerated Ma’s superstitiousness with an air of quiet dignity. What meant even more to Ma was that in all her past lives, she had always been in close proximity to greatness, but somehow never seemed to be able to reach for it herself. In this life, she was a Mandarin teacher in one of the vernacular secondary schools in Malaysia that was big enough to have both a morning and afternoon session for two separate sets of sleepy-eyed, untalented students, but greatness had yet to reveal itself.

She had decided that I was going to be the source of this greatness, consulting  her fortune-teller while I was only a mass of soupy cells in her womb. She met the fortune-teller at another pivotal moment of her life, on her way to the first day of her new job, aged twenty two. While they were hiding under the corrugated roof of a bus stop for shelter against the rain, the mystic told her two things: the secret ingredient to grandma’s herbal chicken, and where to find my father.

After waiting for Ba to arrive at the foretold place, marrying him, and having me, Ma set about recreating the herbal chicken recipe from scratch. By then, enough years had passed that the fortune-teller had become a fixture in our lives. I grew up watching Ma nod wisely while on the phone to this disembodied voice, squeezing the receiver between neck and shoulder as she cooked dinner. I remember seeing parts of the curly plastic cord lying across the hot metal of the stove, growing rough and half-melted over time. This was something that happened so often that I thought someone actually lived inside the phone, and was upset when no one replied when I picked it up to complain to them about my mother. I also knew that every major life decision I made—from which kindergarten I should attend to when I should have my first haircut—passed through this detached mouthpiece.

When I was old enough to hold a pen and write, my mother made me keep a dream diary in the hopes that memories from my past lives would cross the barrier into this one. When I dreamt I had been on a stage, bowing to an adoring crowd, piano lessons materialised in my life. The same with art classes, then new running shoes that were the envy of my classmates. But when my eight year old brain suddenly began to dream, with alarming regularity, of eating ice cream for breakfast, Ba finally caught on. After a firm discussion with Ma, she decided to only pay attention to the ones that seemed more abstract.

So when I started dreaming of robes spangled silver and a sinuous path strewn with lotuses at fifteen, Ma knew that this was probably the manifestation of a past life, and it was time to bring me to see her fortune-teller.

Continue Reading at Sine Theta Magazine

[kwananntan]

The Singer and the Storyteller

Forgive me, for I do not have a talent for storytelling as she does.

They took me because I could sing and slaughter—two things, they thought, which could hold the Sultan’s interest for more than a single night. It made their job easier, they said, the guards who knocked on doors each day, dragging girls out of their homes to act as offerings at our ruler’s blood-stained feet.

At first, when we heard that the Sultan’s wife had been unfaithful, we cursed her name, and pitied the Sultan in a single breath. A week later, we were silent.

The beginning and end of the Sultan’s second marriage was swift and decisive, a hammer coming down like a means to an end. I don’t think the celebrations in the streets had even stopped when the first axe came down upon her smooth neck, the clean snip-snick of metal through flesh and bone.

And we all held our breath, mid-dance. Considering the precipice, and how far left we had to fall.

Sometimes in my nightmares, I remember catching a glimpse of her face through the palanquin veils, all bright and hopeful and shining, and then the scene melts, her face twisting into horror, screaming my name as her head falls, the smell of salt-blood choking my lungs. In other dreams, I picture my storyteller in place of her, and those are the worst dreams of all.

Continue Reading at Corvid Queen

[kwananntan]

The earliest memory I have is of the smell of the fish-market. The slick-salt of the sea rushing into my newborn nostrils and the damp of the newly rained ground, steam rising like a reverse baptism, the steaming mist painting my skin in streaks. Mother says of her six children, I was the easiest birth she had & that I came like an eclipse in the middle of the day, a silent scream. And then it was over, and I was there in the middle of a crowd, eyes as wide and black as the fresh tilapia lying dead on the cutting board. How they thought I was mute because I did not cry, and afterwards, no matter how long she soaked me for, my skin would glitter like fish-scales. A recurring dream of my teenage years: I am swimming in the river behind the row of huts, of which our house is one. It starts out as it always does—I follow a school of carp into a mossy hollow, with no need to resurface for air. Yet there is something that lies heavy in my chest, above the divide of my throat and ribcage, weighing me down. My mouth fills with stone, the taste of it sharp and raw, blood pooling out as I spit out the moon. We part the river waters,   solidifying into dark rock the colour of rust. Eventually we merge, until I cannot tell which is moon & which is me. Oh sky, you know I belonged to the sea first.

‘the lake of dreams’, part of the Lunar Maria (2019) micro-chapbook and published in The ASH (2020)

[kwananntan]

We live in a house on stilts above the water, and at dawn we shake off starlight, diving into the murky depths of a mining lake. Like silver fishes, we play in water that tastes of rust, marvelling at the way our skin glitters in the sun. When tired, we lie on the dirt inert, limbs a tangle of drowsiness. In this golden light our eyes are as cloudy as the sickle-slit sap from a rubber tree, the days passing like soap bubbles popping in the heat.

Muar, 1941, published in The Mays Anthology XXVII (2019) and Alamak Mag (2020) 

[kwananntan]

Scenes from the Night Market Across the Sea

The market unfurled before our eyes fully formed, similar to a lotus-flower carefully choosing its time to bloom, each movement deliberate and painstakingly carried out. I had never seen something held together by silk and metal move as if it were a living creature, and stared in open wonder at it, which made my friend laugh as she slapped me heartily on the back. 

“Close your mouth, or we’ll get caught,” she said, patting my jaw shut. 

We sat on the edge of a cliff, watching the first rush of customers slowly file through the open gates. A melody that tasted like lightly spiced tea floated towards us on the wind, and in one sudden, swift motion, she grabbed my hand and pulled me down the winding cliff path and onto the wooden bridge which led to the entrance of the market. Clusters of lotuses floated beside the bridge, and I marvelled at their ability to grow in the briny sea, as well as the multitude of colours - all pinks and blues, reds and purples. 

As we were caught in the crush of bodies that clamoured to be let in, my friend and guide whispered instructions that I only half heard—keep your head down, let me do the talking—did you bring the gift I told you to?—don’t stare too long at anyone, and for goodness sake try not to make eye contact— because I was too busy looking at the others around me. From the cliff, they resembled other human beings, but when you looked more closely, they took on stranger qualities. Near me, a woman covered a sneeze with one hand, while her other hands held two baskets and balanced a colourful earthenware pot. A man much taller than I pushed his way past us impatiently, his boar head bristling furiously, only to be hissed at by my unforgiving companion and made to retreat to the back of the line. 

On the gates were carved the twelve animals of the zodiac, and as we approached, I thought I saw a glint of life in the gems they had for eyes. I wasn’t sure, but I could swear that the milky-jade rabbit, guardian of my zodiac sign, lifted its head and winked solemnly at me.

“Keep walking,” she told me, a hand on the small of my back. “If we’re lucky—”

Stop. 

I hadn’t heard a voice, but it echoed in my head and nearly brought me to my knees. My head swivelled round in a frantic search for my friend, frozen to the spot as other patrons milled around me, ignoring the fact that I was standing stock-still in the middle of the entrance.

“Well, we couldn’t get past them, but we tried,” she shrugged. “Get the gift ready.” 

A blue haze that obscured everything else descended, and two horned demons towered over us as my body shook with fear. My friend looked bored, crossing her arms and waiting patiently as they made their way towards us, one a violent shade of red with yellow sapphire eyes that shone with the light of the sun, and the other green with red eyes that foretold disaster. I bowed my head, unwilling to let them see my face, and they came to a halt before us. 

“You know the rules, trickster. No humans can pass the border of the night market, and there are no exceptions.”  

“We all know that if that were true, there would be no one left to provide offerings to you, since no mortal would know that you existed otherwise,” my friend scoffed. “Name your price.” 

“Our only price is his life,” the red demon hissed. 

She reached carelessly into my pocket and pulled out a string of milk teeth that she had carefully knotted the day before with red string dipped into holy water, making sure all twenty of them were equal lengths apart and tied off with a circlet. Now, she flung them up into the air as if they were disposable, letting the teeth dangle from her fingers. 

“What about these?” She tossed them at the green demon, who caught it with a taloned hand. “That’s far more than you two deserve anyway. You can split it perfectly, I don’t care how you do it.” 

The demons looked at each other and seemed to come together in perfect accord.

“Fine,” they backed off slowly, and I watched them retreat, finally gathering the courage to stand up again. The red demon pointed a sharpened claw at me, and I shrank back slightly, not expecting to be addressed directly. “You’re lucky the water goddess likes you.”

As if in response to that remark, the sea around the market roared up on both sides, froth spitting upwards resembling a cloud of fireworks. The sea’s impromptu celebration cleared the blue mist, and then we were standing in front of the entrance again, the crowd noticeably thinner.  

“Come on,” she grinned and pulled me to my feet, as if the whole exchange had never taken place at all. “Let’s go.”

Continue Reading at Dark Helix Press

[kwananntan]

In the beginning, there was light & then we are kissing. Taste of honey & wine mixing like lightning & the vast ocean cresting upwards to meet its careless strike. The waters settle. We are staring at the 4 a.m ceiling as you strum the opening chord for an unfinished symphony. I tell you about Tchaikovsky at midnight, wading into the freezing Moscow river neck-deep in a requiem of weariness—you sigh, and I ache from the longing of it.

Creation Song, first published in Porridge Magazine

[kwananntan]

The Last Lonely Song

published in The First Line (2018) 

The window was open just enough to let in the cool night air. She pulled the light shawl more closely around her as she absentmindedly checked the clock and watched the tense muscles of her student’s back as he laboured away at the keys, his shoulders rising higher and head swivelling sideways as he tried to get his left and right hands to work together at a pace that was far beyond his ability. The last hour always crept by the slowest, and on a Thursday, it was especially unbearable. She could see frustration in the way her student kept subtly glancing at the clock as if afraid she would notice, and in the careless banging of chords, not even bothering to correct his wrong notes.

She checked the clock again. 9.48. Not too early to end the class, and it would give her plenty of time to prepare for the performance.

“Alright, that’s enough for today,” she said, stopping him in the middle of a particularly laborious section of scales. “Just work on the sections I pointed out, and remember to practice your scales before the next lesson.”

Instantly, life seemed to return to him, and before he was even out the door, she could see him frantically texting friends to ask them to meet up so they could all make the most of the rest of the night.

The door firmly locked, she turned to begin a familiar ritual: tidy the living room as if to make it presentable for guests, and take out the bottle of wine chilling in the fridge— she was about to finish the last dregs of a particularly good red, and was rather sad to see it go. Once that was done, she fished a slip of paper, carefully folded and refolded, out of her pocket. The handwriting on it had become more familiar to her than her own, the cursive bold and black against heavy cream paper, a slight perfume of freesia and orange-blossom lingering like a suggestion.

To 3304—

Your playing last night was as ever, sublime. I sat on my balcony watching the flowers sway

in the wind, and for a moment, I believed that they were truly dancing along, brought alive by

your music. For tonight, I would love to hear one of Chopin’s pieces, the Ocean etude.  I first

heard this piece when I was a young girl at a concert, at the performance of a friend who has

long since passed. Some days, only memories and your music makes these hours pass easily.

Hoping you are well.

4304

She ran a searching finger over her shelves, a lifetime of collecting scores arranged onto an entire wall of shelves, spines worn and peeling, some from her childhood days. If anyone were to enter her home, they would find themselves inexplicably drawn to the grand piano and the shelves surrounding it, stuffed into the corner like an afterthought but spilling out so that they seemed to dominate the entire room without trying. They were arranged by year rather than composer—the year that she had started learning the piece, each year separated by a neat divider with her age at the time written on it. Standing back slightly, one could see the bulk of scores concentrated in the 15 to 18 sections, and they trailed off significantly after the age of 25. She found the etude squeezed between an exercise by Czerny and Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, so far from sight that another might have thought she was hiding it.

The inside of the cover stuck slightly to the first page as she peeled it open, awash in memory. She remembered performing this piece at the first competition she joined, a piece that she’d poured every waking moment of six months into internalising and perfecting, stripping it down until she was sure she had almost forgotten what it truly sounded like. She’d won second-place in that competition, and then stuffed the etude at the bottom of the pile until she moved out of her parents’ house, never played again. If she closed her eyes, she could probably conjure up the exact moment of waiting in the wings, trembling with fear and bile rising in her throat, but today, it no longer felt the same way.

Now, there was only left a sense of curiosity as to how this would turn out, and what would be left. She tried to remember how the piece went, but only snatches of the main melody came to her. The clock ticked slowly down to 10.30, and she flexed her fingers while tapping out sections that her younger self had marked with huge, loopy ’practice!!’ signs. When she felt ready, she drained the last of her wine and stood up to cast the windows wide open, sitting down at her piano to begin.

Pieces like this that were requested by the upstairs neighbour often required her full attention, especially since she hadn’t played it in a while. The rippling chords, the careful exchange of melody from one hand to the other created a whirlwind of frenetic energy in the room, and she felt herself sink fully into the piece, like a warm bath at the end of the day.

She’d forgotten how much she loved the piece at first, before it was torn apart. There were old favourites in the turn of her left hand, a new sense of ease in the runs of the right hand after years of playing, the whole thing coming together in a cataclysmic performance for herself, as well as person that she had never seen in all these years of night-time performances. The piece wound to a close, with her slowing down and savouring the last few moments she spent with it. She could never be sure if the person beyond the window had heard the playing, but as usual, she closed her eyes and imagined that she could hear applause echoing around the room.

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