Content note: Ableism and racism

 

The British plucked us from our prisons and sailed us here, this jungle island in the Nanyang with their treasure striated into the bedrock. More precious than gold, they told us on the ship, as though we had a choice to leave if we disagreed. I suppose some had the choice put upon them: we set sail from Hokchiu with two hundred and four of us in the belly of the boat—we arrived with two hundred. But that was more than enough. Icarine, they call it. We have a simpler name: hochio. Firestone. Every morning we rise and are grateful for the lack of chains. With the swing of two hundred hammers, we crack open the earth.

(And there is light.)

The first time we strike a hochio vein, a man loses a leg.

It happens quickly—the strike, not the loss, or the preceding days that stretch into the dense sun. Our backs curve and straighten with the fall of our tools. There is a dent in the ground before me, a furrow that our line opened over hours, but there is no sign of the riches we have been shipped here to find. The earth is like any other earth. Rich and wet, a brown that is almost indigo, stitched with the roots of dewy vegetation. It breaks easily in the topsoil, and then with more difficulty as we bear down on bedrock. We are two days into mining now, but there is only earth and more earth.

Perhaps there truly is nothing here. Perhaps this all truly is an experiment to see if two hundred southern gangsters and thieves can rediscover their civility. No chains and no bars, they promised. We are free to roam and gather, so long as we work. Perhaps we work fruitlessly. Perhaps this will simply become plantation land instead.

And then, down the row, a pickaxe hits something that sings.

Our heads turn all at once, and that is when fire bursts from the ground and swallows the man’s leg whole. Men around him drop their tools, scrambling for help as he screams and falls.

The fire is no ordinary fire. It twines, it seems to have claws in the way it latches. I cannot help but think that this man will die and I will never even have known his name. I will forget his nameless face soon, but for now it burns into me, thrown in leaping gold.

“Water!” someone shouts. Another runs up with a pail. Brackish water flies in an arc and comes down on the burning man with a dousing hiss of steam.

The man clutches his leg with vacant eyes, past the point of sobbing. We have all ended up pressed around him, as though the interlocking of our bodies might suffocate the flames, or force us to stand and breathe. The scorched leg is hardly recognisable as a limb; cracked, leathery, black and red, and where there is still red it appears to bubble into clinging globules on the flesh.

Tiger, Tiger. The mutter clicks my muscles back into movement; we shuffle, splitting to make way for the Laughing Tiger.

The Warden is white as a ghost with slick golden hair and the shoulders of a beast. He is accompanied only by two of his Sikh guards, bearing identical blue turbans and shining swords on their belts. We don’t know how the Warden’s name came about but have no other for him. It proliferated somewhere in the swaying hold of the ship. Two hundred and four bodies spread many things over travelling weeks: kinship, disease, rumours about the headman awaiting us on the island ahead.

Whichever one prefers to think of him as, the Warden demands, “What’s this?” His Hokkien is stilted, but his tone is unmistakable.

Someone explains rapidly: there was a strike, there was stone, there was fire. The moment the Warden hears stone, his attention swings away from the burnt man. “Show me.”

He is shown the crack where the man’s axe met fire. The Warden has more of us open it up, slowly, carefully. For the first time we see the carmine vein in the dark rock, its surface knotted with translucent flickering stones. One is split down the centre and has turned smoke white.

The Warden smiles. There, his name’s shape in his mouth, curved and sharp.

(We run through the earth, grains to spark to hatch to grain. Time moves in circles until it cracks. Until it fractures. Until it opens up and there are hands turning the land, and they want, and we want.)

The man’s name is Eng Fatt. I feel guilty that I know the smell of his burning flesh and the sound of his screams better than anything else about him. At evening meal, Loh Guan tells us he and Eng Fatt were from the same society in Longyan; they had been arrested with others after a raid, but only the two of them had been well-behaved enough to meet the British standards.

“Do you think he’s going to die?” a man asks.

“He will probably lose the leg,” another says. “That kind of injury, better to amputate.”

“How will he work then?”

A shrug. “Maybe they will send him back.”

I eat quietly, listening to the others talk. We take meals in a long outbuilding, where our elbows always jostle. The meals themselves are always the same: stew with some form of meat and vegetables, bread, tea. We eat freely, but there are still guards at every door, still headcounts before we can collect our trays. The Warden believes in regimen.

“There was nothing natural about that fire. Did you see the way it moved?”

“That’s why the westerners want it, isn’t it, because of the magic?”

“But what magic are we unearthing?” Loh Guan scrapes his bowl. “There are some things best left untouched.”

Beside me Kheng Ann speaks, his furrowed brows drawing tighter. “This island knows itself and does not need to be known. You will never find answers that satisfy.”

The other men look uncomfortable; already most of them avoid Kheng Ann, thinking he’s touched in the head. Fortunately, we are interrupted.

“Sek Juan!”

I turn to find the source of my name and find a bag of cloths tossed into my lap. Mak Kor is already taking a seat down the row. “Go take that to the doctor,” he says over his shoulder, before turning to his food.

Mak Kor and I were also once in the same society. He was one of my elder brothers before we were arrested; even now, I rise automatically with the bag. Kheng Ann eyes me, but I shrug. I’ve finished my meal. The guards let me out, and I trek over to the hospital.

Kheng Ann claims to be a medium for Shou Xing. In the ship, he would point out the south pole star from cracks in the wall and predict the length of our lives. I mostly admired that he believed in longevity at all; most of us surrendered it when we were thrown in prison. But then one night Kheng Ann murmured to us that the man who had been coughing in the back of the hold would die the next day.

And he did. And then four of them did, all in succession, exactly as Kheng Ann predicted. Each time he whispered it he grew quieter, as though he regretted his knowledge but was compelled to impart it. I listened in dreadful fascination. As each body was slung off the ship I thought, at least, that it was not me. If I was going to die a prisoner on some unknown island and never see my family or Ling again in this life, I would at least have forewarning.

“I thought Shou Xing was a god of blessing,” Chiat said to Kheng Ann one of those rolling, salt-sprayed nights. “But you predict death?”

“We must also accept the lack of the things we pray for.” Kheng Ann had a voice like a brass bell rung in an empty stone corridor; it reverberated, invoked reverence, made your skin prickle.

The last morning on the ship, he woke up sweating profusely and rasping. The whites of his eyes were dilated. “We’ve arrived.”

“And are we about to die?” I asked, alarmed.

“It depends on forces beyond the stars.” Then he slumped over, and by the time the ship dropped anchor, he denied saying anything at all.

The hospital appears in its clearing, pieces of its roof carved out by the shadows of the trees. We built it in the first week along with every other part of this colony—we had to build a settlement before we could mine from it. We cleared the land, slotted in the floors, and packed the walls tight to protect from the monsoon rains, then brought in the things from the English doctor’s cargo. There were medicines, bandages, salves, instruments wrapped in leather. Preparations for tropical illnesses, physical injuries from work. Were they prepared for burns? I clutch the towels tighter, wonder about the state of the man’s leg. I can still smell the burnt flesh. As I step into the hospital, something crunches underfoot.

I squat to peer at the floor. Where my sandal landed, something like porcelain shards are dissolving into steaming blood. I stare, but cannot find an explanation. I think of what Kheng Ann said: this is an island that knows itself and does not need to be known.

I move on. I pass the doctor’s office on the right, which smells of apothecary and alcohol. There is one of us in the chair now, another whose name I do not know, with a needle in the crook of his arm and blood flowing into a vestibule. The doctor observes this.

“Sir?”

The doctor barely glances at the bag in my arms. “Put it by the bed.”

I hesitate, transfixed by the blood oozing through the tube, but I gather myself and move on. Further down the corridor is the bed bay, where we installed a row of cots. Only one of them is filled. I cross the room and set the fresh cloths on the foot of the bed, as told, but I cannot help looking at the sleeping man.

His leg is covered only by a thin sheet that stinks with a salve. I stare at it. The air fills with the whine of insects somewhere in the canopies. I do not know what compels me to draw back the cloth.

The globules I saw in his leg earlier have vanished. It is as smooth now as a charred leg can be, only striations of skin and flesh, and somehow that is worse. I replace the sheet and leave hurriedly, but as I do I hear the scratch of scampering things somewhere in the distance, fading away into the open jungle.

(For most of time, we remain beneath the ground, in cool wetness, alone.
Now tunnels open.)

Excavating hochio without cracking the fires is slow, tedious work. Half of us whittle out spheres from the rougher cuts while the other half continues mining the ground, looking for more veins. Slowly, the chests the Warden brought begin to fill, layer after layer of rounded firestones brimming with power.

We do not see hochio after it has been delivered, but one evening, an officer cracks open a stone in a firepit and we roast the meat of a python the officers shot in the jungle. The Warden wears the skin around his shoulders. He is smiling. The first shipment has reached England. The Queen is thrilled. We are all doing an invaluable service to the Empire.

After the feast, the fire keeps burning. It never wavers, and only water from the island’s river can douse it. It becomes the centre of our settlement. We see, for the first time, the stones’ power.

The Warden grows more eager as our work expands. As we uncover more hochio veins—the entire island knitted with them, north to south, east to west, circling the shores—we are woken at dawn and dismissed only when the darkness becomes dangerous. We learn quickly not to try and resist—that they are generous until they are not. We also learn quickly to be useful: it’s Chiat that first finds Eng Fatt missing from the hospital.

“He’s been sent back to China,” the doctor says curtly, when one of us manages to ask. “Couldn’t work here anymore, not with that leg.”

We knew our transfer here was conditional: we were all made to sign papers, although most couldn’t read them. We were told we were to work, and to comply. But we had not considered what happened when we became unable to do so.

So we work. Our muscles harden and our skin grows dark. When I pause to wipe away sweat, I am taken aback by the rigidness of my arms, the roughness of my fingertips. As a child, my cousins teased me for being fat. Ah bui, ah bui. They would prod at my rolls while our elders laughed. Now with every swing of the axe and hammer I shed that soft child. Burning fat leaves me lean.

There are some things that even work cannot prepare us for, however. We are used to typhoons, but here the air turns viscous hours before the storm, slicking your skin in anticipation, and when the monsoon arrives it seems to toss the sea at the earth. The jungle turns pitch black and alive, a million heartbeats trembling in the howling wind. Leaves curl into themselves; roots swell and extend. Even in the settlement the ground melts into mud, loose earth washed down slopes, tunnels flooded, trees caving in roofs.

On the storm days that even the Warden must concede to, we spend the hours huddled indoors, stuffing cracks in the thumping walls and swapping out pails collecting rainwater dripping from the roof. The world is reduced to the enclosure of walls we can only hope hold; within them, sharing breaths, all our lives are joined. In times like these we learn the abandoned pieces of each other: I was once a potter’s son; Chiat was once a magistrate’s musician; Loong spent summers making paper kites with his brothers. Now there is no pottery, no music, no kites, but we are stronger, leaner. We carve suns from the earth.

To protect us from the malaria fever that blooms in wet places, the doctor regularly takes our blood. We are called to his sitting room, where he inserts a needle into our arms. The blood and the toxins trickle into a jar before they can transform into disease. When I am in the chair, I cannot help but watch. The blood seems to bubble, crystallise against the glass like beads. But then the doctor seals off the jar and it dissolves once more.

Phials of our blood line the doctor’s cabinets. He keeps notes in his drawers, closely written, but we do not know what they read. He tells one of us that he will be the first to understand the source of the fever.

Once, I am sent to deliver a box to the Warden, and I find him smoking in his office. He seems in a more amicable mood, and as I set down the box he looks me over and nods approvingly. “I remember you. Youngest in the force, aren’t you?”

Only by mere days. Many of us are young, it is why we were chosen to work.

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“You’ve gotten stronger. Healthier. More disciplined, too.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re all strong young men who could still have good futures. China was ready to lock you all up and throw away the key, brand you evildoers for life. You know what I said?” He leans forward and clasps my shoulder, almost paternal. I dig my nails into my palm and feel the skin break. Something drops and tickles down my leg.

“I said I’d sweat the evil right out of you. Treat you well, give you some good hard work, remind you what it’s like in civil society. People thought I was crazy, you know. But for the first time in your lives you have a steady job, you get twice the food they were feeding you back there, you get good sleep. I’ve always admired how hard you Chinese can work. It’s a good spirit. Strong blood. We’ve just got to buff it up a little. And I see it coming out.”

As I return to the mining line, a mosquito lands on my arm and I smash it under my palm. Amidst the splay of legs, a bead of blood wells on my browned skin. It hardens into carapace, the viscous edges spidering into six legs, and then the little crab slips off my elbow and vanishes into the earth.

(To gather, to gather, to gather.)

Several more officers sail in to manage the operations, and we build them quarters, as well as facilities for recreation and brewery. The Warden decides the settlement needs a proper jetty, so thirteen of us are assigned to the team, including myself. But the very first day that we survey the shore, I break out in violent, feverish shivers. The doctor takes one look and diagnoses me with malaria.

Some diseases build slowly, clamber up. Malaria spears me through the chest. I lie on the cot, too weak to even toss; my body swings from chills to burning to simmering in my own sweat. My stomach twists and has me retching until I’m ragged. The doctor doses me with thin soups and bitter bark medicines, but there is a glimmer in his eye as he hovers over my bed.

“Tell me how you feel.”

His voice needles into my skull. The answer is that I feel like I am dying. I feel like I am dissipating into heat. I feel like someone has scooped out my insides and twisted the muscles dry. He writes his notes, takes my blood, takes notes again. Outside, it is sticky, then howling with rain, then hot once more. The doctor asks, feeds, takes notes, extracts. Sometimes in the phials the blood hardens, forms something like shells, but it always dissolves before it can hatch.

“Your blood is strong,” the doctor says meaningfully, without any meaning at all. I find myself trying to remember if this was Eng Fatt’s cot before he was sent back home, if I can feel the indent of his body in the mattress. I wonder if I will follow him back. Half of me is afraid of losing my purpose and the other half is glad, reaching for home. Both halves burn and burn and burn, pushing me in both directions until I feel as though I am tearing deliriously in two. “It looks like you’re pulling through,” the doctor says, as my body twists and twists again, and he, too, looks torn.

But then the doctor is right. One morning I am as sick as ever; then the sun sets, and something seems to sigh. My body gives one final violent shiver, every limb seizing, before I collapse on the mattress and suck in the cleanest draught of air I have ever tasted. I feel entirely cool. The doctor gives me a final dose of medicine and proclaims me well enough to leave.

My strength slowly returns as I hobble out of the hospital into an unusually bright night. The moon is round and white over the trees. It is quiet, save the insect whine and the scuttling in the shadows. I run my thumb over the raw marks in the crook of my arm. A single crab squeezes its way out of a scar. I watch it skitter down my arm, dangle on the tip of my finger, and fall.

I wake back in the barracks to find Kheng Ann staring at me from his cot. An involuntary shiver travels down my spine that has nothing to do with the fever. It is too early; dawn is still some moments away, and the whites of his eyes are luminous. “It will not take me,” he murmurs, “it will bring me back.”

“What?” My head is still in a fugue of lingering heat. “What are you talking about?”

His eyes flutter. Within seconds he is asleep again, chest rising and falling steadily, and I curse him. Is this what it is to be the voice of a god? Plagued by nonsense? My irritation simmers, but we have seen his omens proven right before. I let him sleep a few minutes more, even as the rest of us begin to rise, and eventually he is roused by the morning bell. When I ask, he doesn’t remember ever speaking.

We take our breakfast of bread and dried fish. The food has not improved, although merchant ships have been delivering increasingly plentiful crates, paid for with the wealth from the sale of hochio far off in the west. Better, still, than the year back home that there was a drought. As the hills cracked dry, men splintered alongside them, driven to terrible lengths to take what food they could get. You see the worst of men when they try to take what isn’t theirs.

Down the table, there is a mutter about the sea. The full moon has brought the roughest tides; we can hear them at night, swallowing bites of the shore. “They’re too high,” says Loh Guan, now the leader of the jettymen. “We won’t be able to work.”

“Storm coming in too, maybe this evening,” someone else adds.

Mak Kor jabs his fork across the table. “The Warden won’t be happy.”

“He can be angry, or we can be dead,” another man retorts. “Guan Kor, I’m with you.”

There’s a chorus of low, scattered assent, just out of the guards’ earshot. Loh Guan nods sharply in my direction. “What about you, Kheng?”

No, not my direction. I have just never seen most men acknowledge Kheng Ann’s presence. In turn, his voice is surprisingly soft when he says, “What you will, Guan Kor.”

Loh Guan looks unsettled but not dissatisfied. He nods, turning away, and I finally realise what has happened. “You replaced me on the jetties?” I ask Kheng Ann.

He shrugs fluidly. “I was the closest.”

My body feels warm, whether it’s simply echoes of the illness or something worse. I avoid Kheng Ann’s eye, afraid he will see how secretly glad I am that he has to make this decision today for me. Down the row, Loh Guan and the others clasp hands, set their jaws.

Ever since we learned their brother had been sent away without warning, considered lame and useless, the other members from Eng Fatt’s society have been black-faced and muttering things in the direction of insubordination. They say that it is unfair, that something must be done. In the past, the rest of us have always merely exchanged terse glances, then kept our heads down and wrapped our hands tighter around our tools to make more headway into the rock. But something stirs now, as plates are cleaned and watery teas knocked back, a storm gathering within the walls. We rise and file out—most of us to the mines, others to farm plots and mechanics. Twelve of the jettymen walk the beach road toward the shore, pressed shoulder to shoulder like it will make them less breakable. Kheng Ann tails behind them.

(There will always be some who break.)

At afternoon meal, Kheng Ann’s seat remains empty. And then, quickly, we realise that we are missing thirteen. “Smell that?” a man asks, the one talking earlier about rain. He’s right: the promise of a storm sweetens the air.

Some time after lunch, someone trips and cuts their arm. The blood drips, grows legs, grows shells, skitters away. It is only now that I think of how many we must have shed already without knowing—the hochio resists digging, and we rarely make it through a week without some injury. I imagine the hundreds of crabs burrowing beneath our feet, returning to the earth.

Usually we work until dark, but today the guards come before sunset and corral us towards the beach, where I see the jetty for the first time. It’s unfinished, but its bones jut from the water, reaching out to incoming ships. One is currently anchored further out, while a tugboat bobs on the shallows.

Kneeling on the sand are the jettymen. They look unharmed; they remain unbound, and yet something wrong has occurred. My eyes find Kheng Ann, but his head is tilted back to the grey sky. Suddenly, with dread, I understand the boats.

The Warden steps forward. “You were all brought here on the conditions of your work. If you refuse to work, then you will have to be sent back. These men have refused. They leave today. Is there anyone else who wants to join them?”

A ripple goes through us. We tense, every man waiting, every man wondering. Is it better to be shackled at home than roaming free on a foreign island?

In the end, none of us move. Not the kneeling jettymen, who surely knew the cost, nor us in the crowd, who realise we are unwilling to pay it. When the silence stretches to breaking, the Warden gestures and the jettymen are loaded onto the tugboat. It recedes into the distance, swallowed by the shape of the larger ship waiting.

Now we are one hundred and eighty-six. We swing our hammers and bleed the earth for firestones. We sow seeds and pull up plants. We build and we cut down. A new team is gathered to stake the jetty into the sea.

The Warden believes hard work will occupy our minds, but there is blankness in rhythm, a moment in which ache slips into numbness and specks of thoughts begin to flow into the vacuum, a kernel into a stream into a flood. I think of home: the hills rolling into rivers rushing into iron bars, narrow rooms that stink of men, the tang of rusting chains, turtle soup and fresh bamboo shoots, pork bones simmered in cloves, old bones stripped between teeth, hunger and thieving and drinking. I wonder if the thirteen regret their choice. I hammer the earth and sweat, and I wonder if I regret not joining them. Good work and the company of brothers is not a bad way to live, but there is also family, and the sounds of home, and all your brothers in the world cannot make up for the want of a good woman. I used to dream of running a house full of happy children. Now, at night, Kheng Ann’s empty bed reminds me that if the stars foretell my fate, I now have no way to read it. Nonetheless, I hope he has found a better one.

Four days after the full moon, I dream of hochio. In the dream, we work on brown earth. Our axes peel back the ground until we find the vein pulsing, red and warm. We begin cutting out the stones. But then one of us—perhaps I, perhaps any other—brings our axe down too hard, and the hochio cleaves open.

Instead of blazing, the fire pours out of the stone, pooling around the gash and making the earth steam. It gathers, and then it flows: upward, upstream, up the unexcavated vein. We shoulder our axes and follow the river. As it flows, it melts the earth, exposing its own ore. Some of us stay behind to harvest the stones. But some of us go on as the river crawls uphill, and there is a soft cliff ahead, streaked with veins just under the surface. The river continues to climb, as though migrating toward a necessary and inevitable destination; we clamber up the cliff, past a jutting overhang. Here, now, we stand on a strange landscape, bristled on the horizon. We follow the river past calcite deposits and twin caverns, down the side of a ridge to where a crescent slits open the earth.

As we approach, the crescent lifts and opens into a great eye, staring at the blackness of the universe. I recognise it then as my own. The river of fire trickles into its corner, welling in the viscera until all I see is flame.

I wake, weeping, and find Kheng Ann’s cot still empty. Even more so: his mattress has been stolen by an opportunistic brother, to thicken his own bedding. I gaze around at all our sleeping bodies, remember the warmth of the earth in my dream, and slip from my cot to go outside.

We aren’t watched while we sleep; we are free to roam the island, except for the Warden’s buildings where the guards stand. They do not expect us to escape—the waters are choppy and there are sharks, and there is nowhere to swim either way—but we are also not meant to want to. It is true, that here there is order, here there are always meals, here I am getting stronger and have my brothers with whom I have a bigger purpose than prison. And yet.

In the jungle just beyond our barracks, there is a shrine to Guan Gong. We put it up one night when the guards were not around to see. One of us painted the god on a block of wood and tucked it under a shelter of stones. His power feels distant here, not made for this air, but we do not get to choose our blessings.

As I kneel, something shifts in the stones’ shadow. I lower my head to look into the niche. At the back of its recess, Guan Gong’s red face begins to fracture. The fractures lift to reveal legs, and then crabs swarm over each other like spiders, making the god’s face writhe. Then I see the trail of red leading out of the stones, headed to the shore.

So I head to the shore.

The road to the beach is tangled with the outskirts of the mangroves. The moon is still heavy in the sky. Out on the shallows, there is a body.

I rouse others.

As we watch, the tide buoys the body closer and closer until we can see that it is Kheng Ann, that the salt has sunk into his eyes and polyps have sprouted in the patches of his scalp but that it is our great medium, and he is not back home, and there is a hole right through his forehead where a bullet opened his skull. Water has washed away the splinters, left the tunnel clean. But still, two red crabs are clinging to the grey muscle. When we peer at them, they let go. They fall between his ears, sink into the water at the bottom of the well.

Had he known, when the Warden put them on the boat, that he was about to die? Had he sought his south pole star and been shown this, a vision cleaving through the dense future like a bullet? I imagine the twelve others lost to the sea, returning the thirteenth against all laws of the tide to deliver his final message.

It will not take me, but it will bring me back.

We understand, now, that we will live or die here. We are not worth the ship back; the only home we have to return to is the waves and the earth, to claim and be reclaimed in turn. We haul Kheng Ann’s body onto the shore. Bury him beneath the sand. The first part we know: turning out the earth, reaching deep inside it. This second half is unfamiliar: press the sand back into itself, scatter it smooth. The grains trickle between my fingers, prickling like a breathing thing.

If we must make a life of this island, then let us also make its first ghosts.

(To claim, to eat, to sustain, to survive.)

The sun bears down, swills us in the wet heat. Our backs curve and straighten with the fall of our tools. It is the rhythm of months baked into our muscles. Except now there are the glances; now as we heave rock down the line there is the sense of something swinging from shoulder to shoulder, solidifying with every grip.

Kek beng, kek beng.

Mak Kor cuts his finger on the edge of a shovel, scattering crabs into the soil that gleam as red as the ore.

Revolution, revolution.

The intention to mutiny builds and simmers like heat. It is uncertain, still, a mirage more than a plan. But we know now about our fates, and few of us are willing to accept it. We skim smaller pieces of hochio from the stocks and tuck them in our pockets. We sharpen our tools with extra care. We watch the guards, memorise the routes they take. We make up lists of names, repeat them in our heads: The Warden. The Doctor. The guards’ officer with the blue eyes.

We understand rebellion. We have seen war. When heavenly kingdoms fall, the land they rest upon must shatter.

(We scatter, we wait, we grow.)

The Laughing Tiger gives no indication that he knows about our plans, nor that he executed our brothers for being inconvenient. He continues to prowl in his pressed shirt and shining cuffs, his pale skin shielded by a broad-brimmed hat. He is an imposing man, physically capable and intimately self-assured. I remember the way he gripped my shoulders and told me of his mission.

But hochio has fattened the Tiger up. He boasts that it will usher in the next Industrial Revolution in the West: stone that will replace coal and burn infinitely; ships that will sail further and faster than any now known to man; the power of the sun carried in the palm of your hand. By the time the rest of the world understands England’s new power, there will be little left for them to take. The Warden is glutted on his success. A predator is not truly dangerous until they believe they are right. But a predator may be weak if they believe they are invincible.

We do not realise one of us is missing until Chok Ban rockets up in bed, digs his heels into the rattan. “Where’s Heng?”

There is a searching pause, one that sharpens with every thumping heartbeat. Then Chiat swears, chao chee bai, and that soft idiot, and we all push ourselves to the edge of our beds, heels touching the floor ready to run. Heng has always worshipped the Warden; Heng has children back home, Heng wants to do right by them, Heng believes this will make him a better man for them. Heng would sweat the evil out of himself if he could. And now we wonder: What has he done? And: Is he the only one? We curl our toes but freeze there, on the precipice of launching, expecting the door to burst in with guards or for someone else to make a break. Which will it be? Who will it be? When will it—

The door opens. Heng is standing in it, pale-faced.

We swarm him, yanking him through the door and tossing him into a circle. There are fists and yelps, elbows jostling against ribs in panic and anger, until Chiat storms through and grabs Heng by the scruff of the neck. Heng’s nose is broken, blood hatching in his nostrils and skittering over his lips.

“What did you say to the Warden?” Chiat shakes him with both hands, translucent little crabs flying from Heng’s wounds and slipping between the floorboards. “Bastard, what did you do?”

Heng lets himself be shaken. There is an iron deadness in his eyes. He spits out blood, and where the droplets hit the earth they grow pincers and scuttle away. “He laughed,” Heng says finally. “He sent me away. He said he would like to see us try.”

(Every warm season, we move as a tide. Predators come. We are crushed underfoot. We move nonetheless, to continue. We try, we try, and some fall, and many make it to shore.)

We muster to the bell knowing it must be today. Nothing stops us from gathering. The guards are posted in the eating house as always, and perhaps it is merely in our minds, but there is a tension, suddenly; the realisation that we outnumber them so vastly; that there would be a hundred more for any lost brother and one of us must merely be willing to take that first fall.

It comes before noon.

It starts far away, too: a man in the warehouse makes a mistake in the sorting, and an officer jabs a finger in his face. The man picks up the tray and swings it at the officer’s face. The edges rip into skin. Crabs hatch from torn temples as the officer falls. The man picks up a post, brings it down on a firestone, and the building comes ablaze.

We see the smoke all the way from the mines. One by one, our axes lower. There is a moment of stillness. Then one of the guards begins to shout orders to fetch the Warden, and our axes lift again.

There would be bells clanging if there were anyone to hear them. But the Warden and his officers believed so entirely in the depth of their benevolence. They have stranded themselves.

There are stones. There are strikes. There are fires.

(There is blood.)

We see the crabs pouring out of the hospital before we reach the door. They stream ribbons around our feet, although some fall under heels and crack into liquid that darkens on the soil; we trample in and find the Doctor already bleeding, already dead, more of us already standing over him with machetes with clumps of crabs dangling from the tips.

We find his notes and toss them into the fires. We overturn the cabinets. We uncork the phials and upend them over the floor. Our blood hatches on the way down and then the floor is finally crawling red, climbing between our toes in their quest for the door and the windows. How do they know where to go? They are born with direction, disparate specks becoming rivulets becoming floods, blanketing everything in their path as they flow into the open ground and the sun infuses their shells with fire.

There is one place left for us.

(There is the Tiger.)

The Warden’s guards are dead or missing when we slam the door open. The Warden jumps up, and the falter of his expression makes us realise that he has truly never considered that axes and hammers could break open more than earth.

I am not the one who strikes the first blow. I am not even the second, or the third, or the fifth. But my axe meets flesh and comes out bloody. I pull back gasping at its catharsis. The blood on my blade beads, grow pincers, fall to the ground where they get lost underfoot.

We sling the Laughing Tiger by the limbs and march him out to a fire, red crawling in our wake. His lips are still twitching, dribbling sharp shells. As we bear him into the flames his mouth falls open, one final gape before he slumps entirely dead. Crabs pour out of his throat, skittering away from the heat. We can hardly see the ground beneath them. The tide of red climbs over rocks and bodies and debris, headed shoreward.

(To meet at the edge of the sea, to rebirth, to return to land unbroken.)

We return to the Warden’s lodge. Someone hoists a piece of hochio, but someone else shouts for him to stop. They throw open the doors to his quarters and open a drawer instead.

And so, here, the simple things: picture frames, a mandolin, a vase of purple orchids, cigars that smell like cedarwood, and enamelled boxes carved from rosewood.

Chiat picks up the mandolin and his fingers remember softness. Do you remember this song, he asks. Is it a time to sing? Ang says. It is time to start singing again, Chiat replies.

We don’t know the song he plays, but we sing it anyway. Sing for sorrow and for victory, for home and dug-up earth, for the blood that runs, runs, runs down to the beach to lay its eggs in the tide, to hatch in the froth and run back to the land—(run, run)—You do not need words to sing.

Someone hoists their shirt onto a pole and the Warden’s blood hatches from its seams. We sing and dance from the jungle to the beach, sweaty hands on bloodstained shoulders on loosening backs. There is a boat there and it burns too, bathes the hatchlings in firelight, puts their shells against a new sun.

Somewhere, someone finds the wine. We drink and remember toasts. We get our lips red. We are men alone. We are, perhaps—

自在

(Free.)

 

(Editors’ Note: Wen-yi Lee is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2025 Wen-yi Lee