Steampunk World

Hidden Strength Jaymee Goh

When Heong arrived home, it was late. He found a table with dishes still spread out and San Yan sleeping with her head nestled in the crook of her arm. A twinge of guilt plucked at his conscience, located around his stomach. Something also hurt in his chest, but he ignored that. Anything in his chest he tended to ignore as unreal, since the accident.

She looked frail; she'd always been thin. Even when young she didn’t have the characteristic baby fat of their peers, and not from poverty. It was this thinness that led the fortune-teller to advise her parents on what they should name her.

“San Yan," he whispered, gently shaking her shoulder.

She blinked her eyes sleepily. “You're home!” she cried softly. “Have you eaten?”

“Yes," he lied. He didn’t need to eat much after the surgery—eating for energy was for properly-fleshed people.

“Oh. You could've told me you wouldn’t be coming home to eat.” She pretended to yawn, but he caught the brief glint in her eyes, tears of disappointment.

“It was a quick plate of nasi jerebu at Ravi's. Then I had another assignment.” He sat down and sighed mentally at the food, specially prepared for two, and he would have eaten the larger portions. There were rarely any leftovers. He didn’t know how to tell her that his needs had changed. “But I'll eat a bit with you now," he offered.

As they ate, she asked about his day. Normal, everyday conversation.

He did not feel normal or everyday as she widened her eyes every time he mentioned his workload. He did not feel normal or everyday when her eyes swept over his chest and arms, as if she could peer through his shirt at the metal and rubber that the Keling doctor had installed in him. He did not feel normal or everyday enough to keep answering her questions, nor keep talking to distract her from them.

So finally she ate in silence, eyes downcast at her food.

He felt that perhaps he ought to ask her about her day, but it seemed he'd inadvertently closed all doors, locked them, and thrown away the keys. So instead, he said, “I’m going to bed. Long day tomorrow.”

He made sure to face the windows, away from the sight of the rest of their home, a one room shack out of many built on the jetties of the harbour. He couldn’t smell the sea—the only smell he could remember was the smell of onions, which triggered memories of the accident, the fish out of water grab for air that burned his lungs. The rhythm of the waves lapping under their bed was now accompanied by the soft hisses in his chest that regulated his temperature.

She knew he only pretended to sleep as she cleared the dishes. When she was done, she blew out the one candle she had burning and lay down next to him. She took a deep breath, taking in the smell of oil that she was growing used to.

He thought she was disappointed. Who would not be, with a half-man, a half-husband?

Even if he knew, he probably could not have accepted that she went to sleep happy.

The first time they met, he'd been running an errand. Running so fast, he collided into her and they both went clattering to the ground. He fell on her wrong, and her arm broke.

She was as spry as she was thin, and simply picked herself up and cried her way to the nearest doctor. He trailed after her, worried. He tugged at her sleeve to help her avoid the things on the ground that could trip her, because she was just too busy wailing to notice, but otherwise simply walked slightly behind her while tears ran down her face. He stood by her and listened to her scream when the doctor snapped her arm bone back into place. She whimpered when the cast was applied.

Her arm healed straight and strong, but for months afterwards he made amends by helping her with chores she could not do with a broken arm. She had been bossy and resentful at first, and slowly they expressed continual uneasy exasperation with each other.

By the time the cast came off, they were close friends.

The Chap Seh Jeo was where people of different surnames lived, not having any family on the island they came to live on. Some of the younger workers on the jetty had been born there; most had migrated from somewhere else, drifters like Heong and San Yan. The towkay soh’s favour was said to mitigate the loneliness of being far from family.

That was debatable, given the recent accident that cut their numbers by a third, and left one of them half a metal man. The hushed atmosphere, choked by the brine on the wind, still hung heavily over the jetty. Heong felt it keenly; some of his friends had passed him on the way to an assignment without asking him along.

When he got to the jetty clan’s office on dry land, he found the money-counter writing out the assignments of the day. “Lee-phek?”

“Ah Heong?” Lee raised a very hairy and peppery eyebrow. He was much older than everyone else on the mixed clan jetty, had lived there the longest, so was the de facto patriarch. “What is it?”

“What’s my assignment today?” Heong asked, anxious to work. He could feel a lot more normal while working.

Lee’s eyebrows came together to form a caterpillar. “Aren’t you supposed to go for your check-up today?”

Heong had forgotten. On purpose. The doctor, inventor and scientist that had moved to Binlang a year ago had become his benefactor by way of a tragedy. “Ah-"

Lee was already shaking his head. “The sin-sang Keling was very clear to me that you were to have every fourth day off so you can go see him and get a check-up. Have you gone?”

“I thought I'd be more useful here.”

“Hai, Heong-chai," Lee said, scratching his head and sighing, “you know I could use every man I can get, especially you! Your strength is so amazing these days, so you really help make work easier. But I have my orders to make sure you go in for your check-up.”

“But no one else has to. Why do I have to miss out on paying work when no one else has to?” Heong argued.

“Ah Heong…"

Heong shook his head and raised his hands. “All right, all right, I'll go see him.”

Lee nodded in approval. “Then come right back.”

Heong doubted that there would be work waiting for him; it was the dry season, and the number of ships coming in had dropped significantly. Still, there was a chance he would have something to do when he got back, so he jogged to the doctor’s home.

Heong was strong despite his thin frame, so it was easy for him to beat up the other boys who came to tease and harass him and San Yan for playing together.

Some elder was always keeping an eye on the young ones in the courtyard of the alley they lived in. One day there were two old men playing chess while three more sat on rattan chairs nearby, smoking tobacco. Two old women gossiped on the stone steps in front of their shophouse.

San Yan was pretending to keep house and had asked Heong what he wanted for dinner. Roast pig, he had said, and then said, “I’m going to work now," and 'stepped out of the house' to beat up the closest two boys. When he was done, he 'came home' and she pretended to serve him dinner, three flat, smooth stones on a banana leaf.

The elders were very much amused by this; one of the old women even cackled out loud. San Yan later distributed sweets to everyone and asked the hurt boys how they were. She cleaned their wounds with purple iodine and then all the children decided to play hospital, because one had just opened up a few hours' walk away.

The adults tolerated the violent ramifications of Heong and San Yan’s relationship, provided they did their chores and errands faithfully. But Heong’s parents had higher aspirations for him; they had saved money to send him to learn from the teachers at the foothills of Bukit Cina. There was one old man, a scholar from the motherland, who taught at a pondok in between the capital and the hill they lived on.

Soon, San Yan was tending to fewer and fewer wounds, because she had less and less time with Heong.

“San Yan," a neighbour called from the doorway San Yan had left open to let in more light.

San Yan looked up from her embroidery. “Ha?” She squinted. Although the prism on the roof lit up the room, the sunshine blotted out the features of the neighbour, leaving a silhouette at first. San Yan recognized her as Chai Yee, who lived several doors further out on the jetty.

“San Yan, we're going to the temple to buy joss sticks. Do you want to come?”

San Yan was touched. There were not many women who lived on the jetties—jetty wives were exceptions, rather than the rule. The men who came here to work did not bring their family, and if a man could afford to marry, he also could afford to move away. “Oh, no, I have to finish these shoes for tomorrow’s market!”

“Haiya, your Ah Heong is getting paid so much these days, no need to work so hard!” Chai Yee laughed, knowing that joke didn’t have much bite. Workers were paid pittances most of the time as a result of intense competition between the jetty clans. The Chap Seh Jeo received slightly better pay, mostly because of the towkay soh’s generosity, but it still wasn’t much to get off the jetty without a lot of work.

San Yan pondered Chai Yee’s joke. She and Heong maintained a box of savings under their bed, and she had an inkling that it was getting more and more full each time she looked in, but had never counted. She counted the separate box they kept for household funds.

So she smiled instead. “Ah Heong and I like working. Wouldn’t know what to do if not.”

Chai Yee tsked. “Don’t work so hard!” she scolded before walking off.

San Yan stitched on a few more beads and then set aside her work to stretch. She poured herself a cup of water from the kettle on the stove and went to stand in the doorway, smiling at passing neighbours who were coming home to rest after the morning shift.

Some of them did not smile back. They seemed to push out their shoulders at her—she couldn’t miss the black patches they wore on their sleeves in honour of their dead. Heong wore them too, as did she. She'd sewn them on herself. Did they think she forgot so easily the men who died, most of whom had been frequent visitors to their home for evening games of mahjong? Did they resent her the miracle that kept Heong alive?

Despite the heat of the afternoon, she felt cold inside. If this was how they were shunning her, then how were they treating Heong?

While Heong learned the language of a court far away, San Yan was apprenticed to an embroiderer. He was distantly related to her through a great-uncle of her parents. Heong visited her often, bringing beads from the capital city to mollify her master, who always seemed to be agitated by Heong’s presence.

He had carved their names into a nearby tree. Although she was illiterate, she appreciated the gesture. And although they only saw each other every few days in the evenings when he found time to visit her, he could tell she was unhappy despite learning a skill she was good at. His fingers were stained with ink, and hers were stained with scabs from needlepricks of distraction.

“What’s wrong?” he would ask, and she would shake her head and maybe cry.

One day when he arrived to visit, he found her standing over her master’s limp body on the ground. Her hands were clasped over her mouth, and her sleeves were torn. Heong touched the man’s neck and found him still alive and breathing. San Yan wrung her hands, babbling about how she hadn’t meant it and what was she to do?

So Heong persuaded her to pack some things, while he ran home to grab some clothes, a toolkit, his stationery. They ran away in the dead of the night, caught a boat that they thought would take them to Temasek, but instead brought them to Binlang.

Heong never enjoyed the visits to the doctor. They were for most part brief and perfunctory, and he sensed that the doctor was more interested in his own work than in actually making sure Heong was all right.

The visits also took him deeper inland, through the harbourside town of Tanjung Penaga. Here and there, people built factories, all dark-skinned men, workers brought in by the Keling scientists and doctors like Subramaniam sin-sang. They occasionally stopped to stare at him, some of them nodding in acknowledgement, and he nodded back.

One of them even stopped to make eye contact with Heong, and then thumped his chest. Heong looked away. They spoke amongst themselves, obviously talking about him. The man called after him in what he guessed was Tamil, but he didn’t look back.

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.”

“But where?”

“Anywhere.”

Anywhere but here, she heard. “I can’t go back. You know I can’t.”

He stroked her arm. “I can’t stay here," he repeated. “I need to get away.”

“I like it here. I’m finally starting to attract better customers. I like our neighbours. I like your aunt. Please, don’t ask me to go back.”

“All right. I won’t ask.”

He left before the dawn, before she woke up. He didn’t take much, just a few clothes and a toolkit. She also discovered he'd cut off a lock of her hair.

She went through the motions of frantic queries and wailing in friends' arms. They checked the schedules of ships leaving the jetties, both sea and air. She burned joss paper and prayed for his safe return. She heard conflicting rumours of where he was. Even Subramaniam sin-sang came to look in on her out of concern. At night, she pulled herself into a tight ball, trying to contain the pain in her chest.

When she was born, she was so tiny, her parents thought she would die. So the fortune-teller told them to give her a name that would give her more strength. So they gave her a name that meant “three people" in hopes that three of her within the one body would suffice to help her survive.

She did not need three of herself, and while she was sure she did not actually need the love of her life, she was also sure she did not want to be without him, either. If he could live with her secret shame, she could live with his, too.

He had written her a poem once, a little after they had settled into a comfortable rhythm in Binlang. It took her a while to find someone who could read it, but when she did, she was tickled to hear that it was only three lines:

It was, she had decided, very bad poetry, but she embroidered it anyway and hung it up over the kitchen stove.

San Yan was finishing the final touches on the towkay soh’s new dress, feeling very satisfied with the result. It was pleasurable to work for a generous client, surrounded by supportive friends and substitutes for relatives. It was almost enough to fill the hole inside her chest.

She smelled the roast pork first, and felt a stab of envy for the neighbour who was obviously having a feast that night. If Heong had been home, she mused, he probably would have had the gall to track the smell with his nose and casually call on the neighbour for some favour, thus earning an invitation to dinner.

But the smell was coming closer and she heard the key rattle in the door lock. Heong tried to push the door open with aplomb but the dignity of the gesture was cut short since San Yan had the door hook in.

San Yan accidentally pricked her finger as she hastily put aside the dress. She unhooked the door and threw it open to the sight of Heong smiling shyly with a hock of roast pork in one hand. “I’m home,” he said with an air of embarrassment at having been gone so long.

In a moment, they both knew, she would burst into a tearful tantrum, but before that, she grabbed him tight, and smelled the sweat on his neck and back, the gear oil in his chest, the pork in his hand.

What a fragrance!