Diana Pho: Steampunk World

It was not a holiday, so Heong decided not to visit his aunt at the towkay soh’s house. It was awkward anyway; her probing questions hinted that she knew more than he was willing to talk to her about. She could talk to San Yan if she wanted; Heong had enough problems.

There was a shout, and Heong turned to see two men scuffling under a scaffold. They punched each other into the foundation pillars, and other men began shouting too, and jumping off the structure that was being rocked by the violence underneath. Heong ran towards them. One of the pillars began to topple, and he caught it just in time, raising a hand to hold up the next level for balance. Carefully he pushed it back into place. They would have to add some more foundation pillars, he figured, but at least they wouldn’t need to rebuild the entire scaffolding.

The two men who had been fighting were now agog. The other workers ran towards him, smiling and saying things he didn’t understand. They clapped his shoulder and laughed, pointing at his chest. Some beat their own chests, and pulled up their shirts, chattering excitedly. Heong half-understood: they wanted to see his chestplate.

But there were so many of them, speaking a language he couldn’t understand, and it was so hot, and they pointed at him and he knew, he knew they were not unkind. He shoved, just as a warning, but several of them fell backwards from the force of his strength.

The next moment was a shocked silence, punctuated by a few groans from the fallen men. Heong gasped for breath, looked around him with watery eyes, unable to figure out how to begin making an apology.

Then he turned and fled.

His strength found them a place to stay and a job for him almost immediately; her embroidery skills were an adequate supplement to their income. They were given a one-room shack on the jetty to live in that had been used as a storeroom by the others. Re-building it was the easy part.

Life on the jetty was hard, different from the relatively comfortable lives they had left behind. They were not used to living with each other. They had petty fights, mostly verbal. Sometimes they fought physically, and though Heong was the stronger, San Yan gave as good as she got, using everything at her disposal. She had to patch him up several times. The neighbours ribbed him so good-naturedly about it, he felt guilty.

It did not seem fair for her to live in fear of him like that. So he promised to change.

San Yan was having an afternoon nap when Heong burst in, breathing heavily. She jumped out of bed in alarm. “What’s wrong?”

He slumped against the wall and slid down.

“Heong?”

He shook his head, pulling his knees to his chest. “I almost killed several men just now. I just shoved and they went flying. I almost killed them.”

She took a deep breath. To her, Heong was babbling, but he was obviously upset. She knelt down next to him. “Do you want some water? Are you hungry? It’s almost lunch.”

He shook his head again. San Yan began to put her arms around him, but he flinched, so violently she fell backwards in surprise.

“I almost killed them! Almost killed them.” He scrambled to stand up.

“Did you?” she asked quietly, not liking how his voice kept rising in volume and pitch.

“No… I don’t think so.”

San Yan rose and lifted a hand to touch his shoulder.

“Don’t-!” He glared at her with a fierceness in his face she'd never seen before, and she only saw out the corner of her eye his hand snaking towards her.

She responded with the force inside her that they both knew she had, driving her hand forward, her palm making contact with the warm metal of his chest and shoving. Caught by surprise, he toppled backwards, tripped over a chair behind him and hit the floor hard.

It was a bad angle, and they both heard something rattle, click and drop. Heong started gasping; it was suddenly hard to breathe. It was the fish out of water feeling again, and he grabbed at empty air desperately.

He caught her hand, then felt both her hands gripping his, pulling him up. She called for help, called for someone to bring the doctor.

There was no out-of-body experience; she dumped him on the bed and pulled his shirt up. He panicked when she walked off, but she came back with his toolbox. When she unscrewed his chestplate and pulled it off, he felt a breeze touching his fleshly organs.

He couldn’t see, but he felt her thin fingers reaching in, pushing aside rubber and flesh, looking for missing pieces.

“San Yan-" but he didn’t know what else to say.

Of course he knew San Yan knew, at least in theory, what he looked like on the inside. Her voice had carried him through the surgery back to life. Yet now he felt overexposed, a dirty secret stumbling into the open.

She found the dislocated pieces and carefully nudged them back into place. Her eyebrows knit the same way they did whenever she sewed. No, earlier—when she washed the wounds of the alley boys who picked fights with him. He didn’t know why the memory came back now.

He thought his hearing came back first. Then his breathing, though he knew he never stopped. The feeling in his fingers and toes. His stomach took the opportunity to growl.

“Ha! Not hungry, your head.” She finished tightening a bolt and put the spanner down. “Juk is all right?”

Heong nodded.

She brought to him a bowl of cooling juk and began to shove liberal spoonfuls into his mouth. He took the opportunity to reflect on what just happened.

“I could have killed you," he blurted in foul recognition.

“You have always been able to do that," she replied. “But you never have.” She kept feeding him, until the bowl was empty. Then she set aside the bowl, and touched his chest plate. “You've always been able to break me," she said softly, “and now, I can break you too.”

He covered her hand with his. That did not sound unfair.

As it happened, of course he had an aunt in Binlang, working for the towkay soh. He had never expected to meet his Tua Ee again after she had left with the merchant’s daughter she worked for. He had been in awe of her: a world-traveller, who had cooked on ships both on the water and in the sky. Ching Seow Fen had promptly taken him on as a god-son, and San Yan as god-daughter. It was not long before she began nagging them to properly marry.

“What does she know? How much?” San Yan had asked him.

He'd shrugged. “Whatever she knows, we'll still get married soon.”

They had kept putting it off. There was always so much work to do.

She got the full story after Subramaniam sin-sang came to see Heong. The doctor was deeply impressed by San Yan’s skill and lamented his assistants’ lack of talent compared to hers. Heong told her his side, then with Subramaniam sin-sang translating, she asked around and pieced it together. When she came home, Heong was staring listlessly at the ceiling, having refused to see everyone who came to check on him, even his aunt.

She made them dinner, cutting down his portions significantly. As they ate, she told him about how the builders were very sorry, and the doctor wanted to see him again. He didn’t say anything, just nodded.

When they lay down for bedtime, San Yan snuggled up against him happily. Surely, now that everyone saw how his surgery had been so hard on him, they would be more sympathetic and treat him better, and he would return to his cheerful self soon enough.

“Do you ever think about going back to Malakap?” he suddenly asked, and she knew he wasn’t talking to the darkness.

“What?”

“I can’t stay here. I don’t trust my strength anymore.”

“What else would you do?”

He shrugged. “I could go back to Lau sin-sang and finish my studies. Then I could find a job as a clerk.”