Tash Aw - The Harmony Silk Factory

By the time they leave him they are no longer angry. They walk slowly off the mine and go home, heads bowed, arms hanging limply by their sides.

When Johnny opens his eyes again it is night. He sees, through swollen eyelids, the grey bulk of the machine. Slowly, he moves his head so that his ear touches the Dredger. He can hear nothing, and suddenly his arms and legs and head and chest start to hurt, and he collapses again.

“You had it coming, I must say,” No. 2’s voice says. “You’re not as clever as I thought.”

In the dark, Johnny can barely make out No. 2’s figure standing over him.

“I told him,” No. 2 says, pacing slowly before Johnny. “I told him not to do it, not to take on a dirty Chinaman like you. I told him a Chinaman’s place is in the mines, loading and carrying. But no, he had to put you in charge of the machine. A Chinaman operating the biggest Dredger in the Valley? Well, that’s plainly ridiculous. And he fed you and clothed you and housed you. What foolishness.”

“I need new parts,” Johnny whispers.

“Over my dead body,” No. 2 says. “You are responsible for what’s happened, you cretin.” He kicks Johnny’s tools into a pile. Many of them have been burnt with the mattress, their shiny faces now blackened with soot.

“Pack up,” No. 2 says. “I never want to see you here again.”

Feebly, Johnny begins to gather his tools. They are still hot from the fire.

“Don’t forget,” No. 2 says, “that you are responsible for this machine. It’s your fault.”

Johnny raises his gaze to meet No. 2’s.

“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” No. 2 says. He kicks Johnny away with the tip of his shoe.

Johnny’s hand lands on his pile of tools. He finds that his hand has come to rest on a screwdriver. Its handle is smooth and fire-warm. Johnny grasps it and thrusts it deep into No. 2’s thigh.

The court case was short but complicated; there were many difficulties. First of all, no one was certain of Johnny’s age, not even Johnny himself. It was not unusual for a child of lowly rural background not to have a birth certificate — why was there need for one? — and as a result, the precise date and location of Johnny’s birth remained a mystery. Advocates acting for the Darby Mine insisted that Johnny should stand trial for the most serious charge: attempted murder. His physical appearance alone, they argued, suggested that he was at least eighteen. But Charlie Gopalan, a local barrister who specialised in such criminal cases, convinced the magistrate that Johnny was merely fourteen, and should not, under the circumstances, go to prison, where he would surely fall under the influence of Communist guerillas. Mr. Gopalan was a man who had earned the trust of the British. He had studied at the Inner Temple and his clothes were nicely tailored in Singapore. His round-rimmed glasses added to his serious, scholarly manner. In pictures from the newspaper archive in the Public Library, he appears a small, neat-looking man, often holding a briefcase and a hat. He is even said to have begun translating Homer’s Odyssey into Malay. His word, in any event, carried much influence.

There was also the matter of No. 2’s condition. Johnny had managed to stab him in the fleshy part of the thigh, in exactly the place where the artery is at its thickest. The blood loss was immense. It was reported in court that the two men were found nearly lifeless, writhing feebly as if swimming in a shallow pool of blood. For a month after the stabbing, No. 2 remained in the General Hospital in Ipoh. Though he was for some days on the brink of death, he improved steadily. Doctors praised his bravery and admired his “buffalo-like” constitution, and his progress was such that, by the time of the hearing, he was able to walk, albeit gingerly. The familiar rosy-pinkness of his complexion was by this time fully restored to his cheeks.

Thus the case against Johnny was halfhearted, the lawyers becoming increasingly bored as the days wore on. In the face of Mr. Gopalan’s persuasiveness, the magistrate decided that it was sufficient that Johnny received ten lashes of the rotan, “to teach boys like you to know and respect your position in society.” He was cleared of all charges.

What no one knew at the time was that gangrene or septicemia or some other mysterious infection had worked its way into No. 2’s blood, unnoticed by the doctors who had tended to him. He collapsed, was rushed to hospital, but again made a near-miraculous recovery. Once more, doctors marvelled at his God-given strength, and when he collapsed a second time they knew he would pull through — and he did. Month after month, this continued, until finally No. 2 died, exactly a year and a week after first being stabbed by Johnny.

The coroner had no choice but to record a “death by natural causes” verdict.

I do not believe that Johnny would have been saddened by the news of No. 2’s death. I believe, in fact, that it was this first killing which hardened in him a certain resolve. Now he was a killer but he did not feel bad. He knew, for the first time in his life, the sensation which was to become familiar to him later in his life, that powerful feeling of committing a crime and then escaping its consequences. It was this first incident which set him on the path to becoming the monster he ultimately turned into.

IT WAS MANY YEARS before he could find work easily. Ordinary people were fearful of a person such as Johnny. He might not have been a criminal in the eyes of the law, but the law didn’t understand human nature. The law couldn’t always tell good from evil, people said. For a long time Johnny moved from town to town, village to village, plantation to plantation, never knowing how long he would stay or what he would do next. Without the kindness of strangers he would surely have perished. It was inevitable that he would experience his first real contact with Communists during this period of his life. The Valley was, during this time, teeming with them — guerillas, sympathisers, political activists. An ill-humoured youth full of hatred (for the British, for the police, for life), Johnny was perfect Communist material. Of the many journeyman jobs he was given during these years, I’m certain that all but a handful were Communist-inspired in some form or another. This wasn’t surprising, given that every other shopkeeper, farmer, or rubber-tapper was a Communist. These people offered Johnny more than an ideology; they offered a safe place to sleep, simple food, and a little money. That was all he cared for at that point in time.

I LIKE TO THINK of those years which Johnny spent wandering from job to lousy job as his “lost” years, the years which became erased from his life, the years during which he vanished into the countryside. I see him disappearing into the forest as a boy and emerging as a man. That is certainly what seems, extraordinarily, to have happened. Who knows? Perhaps something terrible happened to him during those years in the wilderness, something which turned him into a monster. Or maybe it was the irresistible force of fate which led him down this path; maybe he was simply destined, from the day he was born, to jump off the back of a lorry onto the dusty, treeless main street in Kampar, in front of the biggest textile trading company in the Valley. No one knows about the small odyssey which led Johnny to Kampar. All anyone can be sure of is that one day he turned up and got a job, his first regular employment since the Darby Mine incident, at the famous shop run by “Tiger” Tan.

The reasons behind Tiger’s name were a mystery. By all accounts, he was a gentle, soft-mannered, home-loving man who, on account of his devout Buddhism, never ate meat, even though he was one of the few people in the Valley who could afford to eat it every day. He had plump arms which hung loosely by his sides when he walked. His movements were slow and unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked every bit the prosperous merchant that he was.