The Harmony Silk Factory. Tash Aw
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water yet propelled him steadily at considerable speeds. He could swim without coming to shore for an hour at a time. Once, we swam across the swirling brown waters of the Perak, Ruby leading the way. We were not even out of breath when we reached the other bank.
This time we had chosen the old mine near Kellie’s Castle. It was known that only the bravest could swim the biggest pools, and there were few larger than this. We were only fourteen but we did not think twice about swimming it. Night had begun to fall when we got to the pool. I undressed quickly, eager to feel the water. Swimming in the dark felt different, special: the absence of light made my skin look less pale. The sky was blank and black with cloud. There was no moon; nothing was illuminated. Even the ripples of the water as we slid into the pool did not show.
On this swim, as on every other, there was no purpose, no silly races, no ‘first to the other side wins’. We just swam. A few feet from the edge, where the shelf fell away, I prepared myself for the cold. It gripped my whole body, squeezing the air from my chest. I breathed sharply, chokingly, but I had known that feeling before and so I continued to strike out. Pull. Kick. Pull. Kick. I heard Ruby’s choking breaths echoing my own, but I kept on swimming into the blackness, my eyes closed.
‘Jas,’ came the first call. Ruby’s voice breathed the word, it did not speak it. ‘Jas.’
I opened my eyes and searched for him in the infinite darkness. ‘Ruby?’ I said, still swimming forward.
By the time I realised, several seconds later, that he was no longer there, it was too late. I swam furiously in different directions, not knowing where to look, where to turn next. In the moonless night I thought of the chickens we kept in the yard behind the factory. I don’t know why they came into my thoughts. When you entered the coop to select one of them for slaughter they would run away in zigzags, never knowing where they were going or who they were escaping from. The victim always had a vacant expression on its face, not terrified or even sad, just lost.
Of course it was fate that the first car I met, after walking an hour on the deserted road, was Father’s. It had to be Father who found me, naked and wild-eyed. I shouted out what had happened to Ruby. Whether I made sense or not I don’t know.
‘He’s not playing tricks on you,’ Father said. That was just how he spoke. Never asked questions, always statements.
‘No, I’m sure!’ I screamed.
‘You’re not telling stories.’
There was no need for me to answer.
‘Then he’s dead already,’ he said, opening the door for me to get in. ‘We’ll go back for your clothes tomorrow.’
I was afraid he was angry with me for making him go all the way home before doubling back to Kampar for his evening playing cards. I was afraid, so I said no more.
And that is how my friend Ruby Wong died, more or less.
This, then, is where the Kinta Valley lies, trapped between hills and swamps. This is the valley which became Johnny’s little empire, where he was man and boy, where he started a family, where he was once respected by his people, where he destroyed everything.
4. How the Infamous Johnny Became a Communist – and Other Things
In 1933, two things happened. The price of rubber fell to four cents per pound and Johnny killed a man. It was the first man he killed, and although rumour had it that he did it in self-defence, I believe that the terrible deed was just as likely to have been carried out coldly, with malice aforethought (which I have learned amounts to murder). In any case, the exact events are unclear, and the records from the Taiping Magistrates’ Court are somewhat muddled.
At this point in his life, Johnny was working in the Three Horses tin mine just off the Siput – Taiping road. Many young men (and women too) had begun to work in the mines. The price of rubber was now so low that many plantation owners – even English and French ones – were forced out of business. The plantations ceased to operate and were soon overwhelmed by the jungles which surrounded them. The morning bells which roused the workers ceased to toll, and the kerosene lamps which illuminated the scarred bark of the trees were no longer lit. There was no more work to be found in the plantations. So the young people began to drift further and further away from their villages in search of work, and most of them ended up in the mines.
By all accounts, Johnny was a well-regarded boy. He was quietly spoken, diligent and unimaginative, and was therefore perfect for working in the mines. Although barely in his teens, Johnny was no longer a manual labourer. He had risen above that. His work did not involve digging into the wet, heavy soil for twelve hours each day, nor carrying basketfuls of ore from the bottom of the open-cast pits to be stored, ready for melting. He did not have to do this because, in spite of his lack of intellect, Johnny had one other attribute: a gift for understanding machinery.
There is a story about how Johnny first discovered his in-built ability to assemble and operate machines. There are many different versions of this story, but the essence of it is as follows. Johnny was thirteen years old. He had been drinking palm-flower toddy with some other delinquents, and he had enjoyed it. The sensations were new to him, as fresh in his body as the morning sun that follows a monsoon night. He went to see an old Indian man who lived on the edge of a rubber plantation, who brewed toddy the old way – the only way they ever did (and many still do), illicitly, hushed-up in the half-dark of the jungle. The man collected the young flowers himself; he soaked them and bought the yeast from Cold Storage in Georgetown. He fermented the toddy just as he might have nurtured children. He remembered when each barrel was filled – born – down to the day, the hour even. He knew what the weather had been like at the time of each filling, and he knew how this would affect the taste of each vat of toddy. He knew which ones would be sweet or sour or just strong and tasteless. Whenever he produced something memorable, a toddy of remarkable clarity or distinctive taste, he would give it a special name – White Lakshmi, perhaps, or Nearly As Good As Mother’s Milk.
Johnny was fascinated by this. He visited the old man often, and drank often too. But all this time he was disturbed by the way the toddy was brewed. He didn’t like the old kerosene drums the old man used to ferment the toddy in. Some of them were rusty, and on others the lids didn’t fit properly. The old man said that this was the way things were done, that toddy had to be varied and different. Every sip had to provide you with the sensation of stepping off a cliff without knowing what lay beneath. Mad fool, Johnny thought; he did not accept this. He wanted every mouthful of toddy to be as good as the best toddy he had ever tasted. He didn’t enjoy discovering a bitter toddy, or a new and unusual one. He knew, too, that people sometimes fell sick after drinking toddy; they became blind, they died. On top of all this, one day when they had been filling bottles, they found a rat at the bottom of one of the barrels. It lay bobbing amid the sediment, curled up and peacefully preserved in the alcohol. Not even the cat touched it when they threw it out into the long grass.
So Johnny went away and thought for a long time. He drew pictures in the sand, idle mid-afternoon sketches of simple machines. He didn’t know what he would do, but he knew, instinctively, that he would do something.
People still talk about Johnny’s invention in the valley; they say nothing as magical has been seen since. Not even the revolving dining room at the Harmony Silk Factory, built when I was in my teens, could rival Johnny’s first, instinctive creation. This is high praise indeed, for the revolving dining room was itself a much-admired feature of our house. The entire floor would split in half and a partition wall would emerge from a vault beneath the floor, separating the one large room into two smaller ones. Hidden in the ceiling, behind the walls and under the floor was a simple but highly effective clockwork mechanism. Polished mahogany panelling adorned the room, drawing the attention of a visitor (more specifically, a policeman or a rival ‘businessman’) to the décor rather than the construction of the room. Fake European masterpieces, painted by artists in Penang, hung in gilded frames on the walls. (I looked them up in books when I was at school, and discovered that my two favourites were The Fall of Icarus by Bruegel and The Death