why not the reverse?
Nostalgia
A short story by Ng Yi-Sheng, based on Michael Lee Hong Hwee’s The National Columbarium of Singapore.
It began with the children. They filed into my clinic like ants. Girls in pinafores, boys in tank tops. Walking like sleepwalkers. Listless faces printed with the same blank, impenetrable stare.
She hears voices, said someone’s father. He was a burly Indian man.
What kind of voices? I asked.
No idea, he said. Like someone teaching school. Only everything in Chinese.
I have dreams, said one little boy. Even when I’m awake. There are men and women. There are two crocodiles. And glass tanks. I’m full of fish.
I’m full of books, a schoolgirl told me.
I’m full of old people, said another.
I’m full of Japanese soldiers, said a tiny six year-old. Pew pew pew pew pew pew.
These were the talkative ones. We were grateful for the talkative ones, for the nation had already begun its downward slide into panic. Schools had begun to close to contain the epidemic, yet it struck irregularly, never affecting the same place twice.
I was at my wits' end, until I met Mr Mohaiemen. He was from Bangladesh. He told me how the plague had broken out, months before, in the migrant worker community.
As a rule, employers had covered it up. If a man became unresponsive, he was sent home or simply thrown in the street.
He himself had come here stealthily on his off-day. Surely, he thought, Singapore must have a cure.
He had been working on a site in Kallang, and now he saw planes. Planes, he told me. I can hear them whoosh also. Noise very loud. Come, you listen my body. Not only I hear. You hear?
Sure enough, when a stethoscope was applied, I could make out a distant buzz in his chest.
You can hear, he said, triumphantly. You hear.
We began to send other patients for testing. Amplifying the sound of their heartbeats, we saw signals emerge. Household babble. Barking dogs. Religious chanting.
Our breakthrough came with a blond expatriate child, taken ill after a field trip to Fort Canning. Though he was catatonic by now, unable to feed himself or go to the toilet, the recordings were clear. Cantonese opera. Indian ragas. Rock. Classical fugues and concertos.
The National Theatre, murmured the Head Nurse, who was in attendance. I was there.
Hastily, we called in parents and relatives. With some guesswork, we managed to pinpoint a few specific locations. The National Library. The Van Kleef Aquarium. The zinc-roofed huts at Bukit Ho Swee.
All the government’s fault, a woman muttered to me as she cleaned her granddaughter’s bed sores. They knock down buildings.
You imagine, if you are a building. You won’t be angry? You won’t want to come back and make trouble?
As cases proliferated, we began to treat older patients, with higher profiles. A national sailor troubled by visions of life on a kelong. A minister haunted by Tang Dynasty City.
Strangely, there were duplicates. At least three patients were believed to be the old Changi Prison. Five patients were National Junior College. Two appeared to be the original Odeon Theatre, but with so many old theatres, it was hard to be certain.
There was talk that the very land was rising against us. Scattered reports arrived of factory workers in Tuas and tourists on Beach Road, choking as if suddenly drowning in the sea. One researcher argued forcefully that an NS boy dreamt of the original palace of the Sultans on Fort Canning, yet this claim was struck down for lack of proof.
And still the patients kept coming. Most lay there, waiting to be attended by our frantic nurses, working double shifts, triple shifts even, to change IV drips and adult diapers.
Something had to be done. Yet we could do nothing but name and catalogue the demolished addresses that inhabited the sick.
Then I had my dream. I was in my clinic, between late night rounds at the hospital.
Dozing off, I saw myself on Mount Faber. White shapes were moving in the distance. I imagined they were cable cars, but I looked again, and no.
They were the buildings that had possessed us. The thousands upon thousands of buildings we had tried to forget, twinkling in a shining city in the open sky.
They were beautiful. Their ancient voices were beautiful, and for the first time I understood their language.
We are lonely, they said. We are horribly, horribly lonely.
Then I woke up. And as a man of science, I cannot defend my subsequent actions in court. I can only point to the fact that no new cases of the illness have arisen since my dream. Thus, it follows that the spirits have been appeased.
It was only logic. The hospital ward was brimming with fathers, mothers and children. And if the souls of dead men can be appeased with a sacrifice of burning houses, why not the reverse?
Now, as I write in my cell, I have been told I face my execution at dawn.
It is not without fear that I receive this news. For I know I shall meet my many victims, consumed in the fire. They may well call me a monster, as their families often have.
Yet it is also with joy that I anticipate my arrival in that shining city, that deathless ghost of Singapore.
I shall sit on my stoop there, and observe the towers rising below, like the hills of so many ants.
A short story by Ng Yi-Sheng, based on Michael Lee Hong Hwee’s The National Columbarium of Singapore.
It began with the children. They filed into my clinic like ants. Girls in pinafores, boys in tank tops. Walking like sleepwalkers. Listless faces printed with the same blank, impenetrable stare.
She hears voices, said someone’s father. He was a burly Indian man.
What kind of voices? I asked.
No idea, he said. Like someone teaching school. Only everything in Chinese.
I have dreams, said one little boy. Even when I’m awake. There are men and women. There are two crocodiles. And glass tanks. I’m full of fish.
I’m full of books, a schoolgirl told me.
I’m full of old people, said another.
I’m full of Japanese soldiers, said a tiny six year-old. Pew pew pew pew pew pew.
These were the talkative ones. We were grateful for the talkative ones, for the nation had already begun its downward slide into panic. Schools had begun to close to contain the epidemic, yet it struck irregularly, never affecting the same place twice.
I was at my wits' end, until I met Mr Mohaiemen. He was from Bangladesh. He told me how the plague had broken out, months before, in the migrant worker community.
As a rule, employers had covered it up. If a man became unresponsive, he was sent home or simply thrown in the street.
He himself had come here stealthily on his off-day. Surely, he thought, Singapore must have a cure.
He had been working on a site in Kallang, and now he saw planes. Planes, he told me. I can hear them whoosh also. Noise very loud. Come, you listen my body. Not only I hear. You hear?
Sure enough, when a stethoscope was applied, I could make out a distant buzz in his chest.
You can hear, he said, triumphantly. You hear.
We began to send other patients for testing. Amplifying the sound of their heartbeats, we saw signals emerge. Household babble. Barking dogs. Religious chanting.
Our breakthrough came with a blond expatriate child, taken ill after a field trip to Fort Canning. Though he was catatonic by now, unable to feed himself or go to the toilet, the recordings were clear. Cantonese opera. Indian ragas. Rock. Classical fugues and concertos.
The National Theatre, murmured the Head Nurse, who was in attendance. I was there.
Hastily, we called in parents and relatives. With some guesswork, we managed to pinpoint a few specific locations. The National Library. The Van Kleef Aquarium. The zinc-roofed huts at Bukit Ho Swee.
All the government’s fault, a woman muttered to me as she cleaned her granddaughter’s bed sores. They knock down buildings.
You imagine, if you are a building. You won’t be angry? You won’t want to come back and make trouble?
As cases proliferated, we began to treat older patients, with higher profiles. A national sailor troubled by visions of life on a kelong. A minister haunted by Tang Dynasty City.
Strangely, there were duplicates. At least three patients were believed to be the old Changi Prison. Five patients were National Junior College. Two appeared to be the original Odeon Theatre, but with so many old theatres, it was hard to be certain.
There was talk that the very land was rising against us. Scattered reports arrived of factory workers in Tuas and tourists on Beach Road, choking as if suddenly drowning in the sea. One researcher argued forcefully that an NS boy dreamt of the original palace of the Sultans on Fort Canning, yet this claim was struck down for lack of proof.
And still the patients kept coming. Most lay there, waiting to be attended by our frantic nurses, working double shifts, triple shifts even, to change IV drips and adult diapers.
Something had to be done. Yet we could do nothing but name and catalogue the demolished addresses that inhabited the sick.
Then I had my dream. I was in my clinic, between late night rounds at the hospital.
Dozing off, I saw myself on Mount Faber. White shapes were moving in the distance. I imagined they were cable cars, but I looked again, and no.
They were the buildings that had possessed us. The thousands upon thousands of buildings we had tried to forget, twinkling in a shining city in the open sky.
They were beautiful. Their ancient voices were beautiful, and for the first time I understood their language.
We are lonely, they said. We are horribly, horribly lonely.
Then I woke up. And as a man of science, I cannot defend my subsequent actions in court. I can only point to the fact that no new cases of the illness have arisen since my dream. Thus, it follows that the spirits have been appeased.
It was only logic. The hospital ward was brimming with fathers, mothers and children. And if the souls of dead men can be appeased with a sacrifice of burning houses, why not the reverse?
Now, as I write in my cell, I have been told I face my execution at dawn.
It is not without fear that I receive this news. For I know I shall meet my many victims, consumed in the fire. They may well call me a monster, as their families often have.
Yet it is also with joy that I anticipate my arrival in that shining city, that deathless ghost of Singapore.
I shall sit on my stoop there, and observe the towers rising below, like the hills of so many ants.