By ZH Liew
I never really asked him about the way he grew up, in the place I had only occasionally visited – grounds covered in muddy motorcycle tracks, estate lands that borne the brunt of redevelopment, palm trees that seem to stretch in rows without an end. Spare street lights, sodium yellow, made it possible for the bikes to pass. The village houses still preserved their lived-in, ramshackle beauty, corralling narrow roads that only a local would know how to navigate.
I had returned too late, from airport to city to village, and throughout the journey mother had told me the grisly details of his death – a cancer of the stomach, the scarring of the innards, leading to the inability to eat. The way my grandfather had gone reminded me of a tale from my childhood – the Hungry Ghosts of lore, whose disfigurement in the afterlife could only be reversed through karmic intervention from their kin. On the motorbike ride, back to the old house, I held on to my uncle, who had aged considerably, and was silent throughout.
On the moving trail of the motorbike on land, you see only the never-ending expanse of jungle: a snapshot of the past, where those who fought the British had hidden; a place where you knew your neighbors’ sons had entered to fight, avenge, and recriminate. I had heard others tell me of graves therein, hills that stretched from place to place, hiding voices beneath verdant greenery, the largest places where they had been buried left unmarked by gravestones. The jungle held the specter of looming threats to the village, the locals’ perpetual fear of being caught in cahoots with communists. There were whispers of the schoolteacher having indoctrinated her pupils to join the struggle, only to later betray them to the police for a tidy sum of money; the village clerk whose leg had been blown off by the people inside because of his dealings with the British; the old patriarch who received a gilded cane from a high-ranking colonial official to “administer” the village on his behalf.
The funeral of my grandfather, which I was obligated to be part of, had started the procession as the body was carried towards its final resting place. On the paved tarmac road, and between the houses that hemmed in the narrow road, we walked towards the village graveyard. The band played its characteristic high-pitched blare, filling the air with an unnatural timbre, the unmistakable sound of death. Grandmother walked in front, bearing the photograph at the shrine of departed Grandfather, whose wrinkled face I had not seen for years. My eldest uncle was lost in the crowd.
During the performing of the rites – paper effigies of servants looming over us, to be burned while we whispered the words that would accompany the soul in its journey to the afterlife – I remembered a story that was told when I was still a boy, who knew nothing of the soul’s movements. The details of the story eluded me, like the rites that were presently taking place before me. Yet, I recalled being frightened by the multiple levels of hell, and the notion that one could, if improperly sent off, be condemned to wandering the many levels, suffering punishment indeterminately. It was a child's fear of the unknown, grimly illustrated by the cyclical Buddhist wheel pasted on the village restaurant wall. Numerous figures tossed onto sharp spikes by demon guards, who threw scalding water onto unrepentant souls while the hell fires burned all around them – this vivid image had stuck to me even after all these years.
My eldest uncle had returned to the village, after years in the city. In his grimacing welcome, I sensed a grudging acceptance of the ceremonial duties imposed onto the eldest son, the kneeling and bowing he had to perform to show his piety. While the priests burnt, the joss sticks and paper money for the dead – ghost currency to aid him in the underworld – I could only think of the time, during one of my scattered New Year’s visits, when we had together taken a wrong turn in the jungle, ending up near a stream. The river was a sickly yellow, mud stagnating, trash scattered in pools of debris in the middle. I asked my uncle then whether he had been back in the village during the past few years I had been away – he nodded briefly, unwilling to elaborate further. But even as he stood alone next to the water, I could tell that the years had eaten away at his already thin physique. A disease of place, perhaps, or of the impossibility of leaving.
He pointed at the water ahead of us. “The Strange River,” he said. An overflow from two adjoining streams. This is where the village got its name, the tides that rose and combined to form another temporary body. The early settlers had remembered that initial event to name it thus, and the overflow had become a confluence afterwards. “When I first returned,” he said, “I didn’t believe this story and had thought it the usual invention of the villagers. Spend enough time here and you realize that these things matter.” He drifted off in deep thought, even as his motorbike’s engine purred nearby, its throbbing hum coalescing with the moving stream. Standing there, he formed a painting that had been passed down for generations: man and his steed in a cloud of dust, except here machine had replaced animal.
His transport was what had allowed him to first leave at all and become who he was today. Amid the putrid stench of rubber, the water-drenched soil, and the clinging tree canopies, his motorbike propelled him out of the place where he was born, to the towns and cities where I was most naturally inclined, the concrete sidewalks and endless highway stretches of urban and suburban conglomerations. He had driven himself out of his birth home – the kampung, or village – a place I had never really been part of.
I was a visitor to the land, the sometime entrant to a gate where kampung stories would trespass, leaving the village borders as a porous stream that forked outwards into other places – the cities where their only connection was roads or highways that had been constructed in a flurry of dust, paths through the jungles that had been eradicated, opened by development to reveal nothing hidden.
I had once asked my grandfather about the history of his village. It was impossible to answer that question, he had said. The past didn't exist for people of his ilk, and villagers of a certain age. Even when he had grown up within the confines of this place, a silence governed its relationship with what came before. No one wanted to speak of the village’s past.
In between the funeral rites, the villagers swapped stories about Grandfather’s family and relatives – his children and grandchildren’s successful careers after leaving, their settling in the city. Some had even left the country. Family was the crux of his existence, according to them, and it was said that without family he would have died much earlier, as if they were tongkat for his life. In addendum, they murmured: supposedly he had also been through much of the wars that had encumbered this place.
That was where their stories ended, as if there was an invisible fence which surrounded that time.
“One day,” my uncle told me during a visit years earlier, “A dog had run back to the neighbor's house. It was shivering furiously, as if unable to stop feeling cold. We tried very hard to keep it warm. I rubbed its belly, to try to return it to its normal routine. But it refused to budge from the corner of the house and stayed stricken. We gave up after a while and returned to our work of chopping wood for the village. It just sat there, staring straight ahead, paws placed in front on the ground, as if a supplicant.
“That night, they came. Like angry ghosts seeking vengeance, they swept into the neighbor's house, and we heard multiple gunshots from next door. At first, in my half-asleep state I had thought they were just sounds of fireworks, set off by some mischievous children in the village. Then the burning began, and we smelled the gasoline being poured all over. We didn’t really know what to do, but your grandfather and I started praying together, without any effect. It was as if the gods had left us that day.” It was then that my uncle had started to ride his motorbike, to be able to outrun the ghosts.
My eyes had started tearing up from the smoke of the joss sticks, as the rows of thick ash billowed under the weight of the wind. They floated in front of me and landed on the tarmac road where they had set up the tent. The shrine where Grandfather's black and white photo was laid, for all the mourners to see and pay their respects, was made of aged wood; they would stop by the coffin where you could see his wrinkled face through the bluish glass, eyes now closed. The rest of the shrine was surrounded by things to be burnt – simple objects, like pen and paper, which would be useful in the nether world.
There was a rhythm to the way this ceremony proceeded, as each mourner paid their respects, revisiting their memories of the man who now lay in the coffin. But it was clear that some people were missing in the procession – namely, others of his age who were supposed to provide testimonies about their childhoods, in the village where they had grown up together. “They never returned,” Uncle told me. “They couldn’t after they left to fight during the 1930s, when wartime China came calling. We had gone to see them once in the 90s, Father’s childhood friends from the village, to the Southern Chinese town where they settled, after surviving the war. They hadn’t been able to recognize each other,” he said. “It had been far too long.”
At the reunion, each person went up to the stage to re-introduce themselves, a strange gathering where no one knew what had happened in the intervening years, or even the names of their erstwhile friends. I asked him what they shared that day. “Regrets,” he said, “Regrets for leaving their land, and returning to what they thought was a glorious new home and motherland.” But as it turned out, they had merely traded one village for another, less developed one, and the unlucky ones had died in the war.
The priest entered, with the swirling robes that reminded me of what I had seen in television movies when I was young. I’d dreamt of this figure before, his presence a menacing one in my childhood, which had been explained away as superstitious dreams by my mother. The long, dark material encased him within a prison of cloth, even as he carried a pair of handcuffs that attested to his authority.
Grandmother stood up solemnly to hurdle the pass between the living and the dead. It was a paper bridge, no larger than something a child could have crossed, yet here she was, transcending the living, sending her beloved across the seas of existence, through this simple gesture. The loud blaring of the bronze suona began, a solo backed by the hired funeral band, as the priest jumped between both sides, signaling the struggle to depart into the other world. It seemed like an act, yet we sat transfixed, as she too followed her husband’s journey to cross into the underworld, as his closest kin. It was a play, this ritual that had been passed down from generations in the village. I sat still as they acted out the remaining crossings between life and death, in front of us all.
The funereal music stopped, as the coffin was lowered into the ground. It was strangely quiet, the surrounding mounds visible from where we stood, as if the birds had ceased their usual chirping and had disappeared from their perches on the various graves. The undertakers had dug up a fresh spot for him, and the tombstone was marked with the strokes of my grandfather’s name and his ancestral village. As he was lowered, I thought of the many who hadn’t returned – the ghosts destined to roam foreign lands and the neighboring jungle. Perhaps Grandfather would join them now.
The dirt and mud obscured his face one last time, leaving us to gaze at his part of the land.
ZH Liew recently completed a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on Malaysian Chinese history and literature. He is interested in documenting migratory histories, and their relationship with oral narratives of the land. His writings have appeared in Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Full Stop Quarterly, Naratif | Kisah, and The Wknd Sessions. He lives in Petaling Jaya.