Work Text:
Thou shalt leave each thing
Beloved most dearly: this is the first shaft
Shot from the bow of exile. Thou shalt prove
How salt the savour is of other’s bread;
How hard the passage, to descend and climb
By other’s stairs.
- Paradiso, Dante
Hamilton literally wrote a verse to get him off an island — that’s the most hip-hop shit ever.
- Lin Manuel Miranda
To you, she would always only just be Gin. Of course, people had called her a lot of different names over the years: on book covers and bylines she was Virginia M., in bibliographies V.C. Mah, legally Mah Chui-laan– but Gin was what she called herself, and Gin was just what stuck. Short and strange and slippery: despite everything, it just felt more like her, you know?
You liked to believe that you were qualified to make these kinds of judgments because nobody in the world cared more about The Life and Works of Virginia M. than you did– even though this achievement was undermined slightly by the fact that nobody in the world cared who she was except you. Admittedly, it wasn’t like you knew much more about her than anyone else did, either. You knew that in 1980, she’d written an “important” (Kim, 2015) and “ground-breaking” (Washington, 2013) novel The Circling Year, the first and the last thing she ever published. You knew she’d read Classics at UC Berkeley. You knew, vaguely, what she’d looked like: straight hair, sensible jeans, those oversized sunglasses, dark and mirrored like oil-slicks.
And, of course, you knew– from a single, throwaway line at the very end of her Wikipedia page– that she’d attended the same secondary school you did. Sure, there hadn’t been any source to speak of, but your obscure school– an obscure novelist– who cared enough about either of these things to bother lying about them? Besides, it sounded possible, and that was good enough for you.
This was what you were thinking about, more or less, the night that you locked yourself in the dance studio.
Eleanor says, They're not going to stop looking for him. The others all got suspended. Did you hear?
Two years each, Daniel says. My mother called last night. She's been crying. Though I think she's mostly worried about the med school applications.
You're not—
What else am I supposed to do? He says it like he’s expecting an answer.
Don't pretend this is the only way.
What, like his way? Running straight into their batons? Getting ourselves— He stops himself before he can go further. There is a long silence. They put in new lights here last week. White. Fluorescent. Fake. He is only realising this now.
He might not be dead, Eleanor offers.
Right. Sure. He's living on a commune somewhere, reading Marx to the chickens, Daniel snaps. It surprises him. He’s not a sarcastic person. Or at least, he wasn’t. Don't, she says. Sorry, he says. He softens his voice. I'm sorry. I miss him too.
Eleanor takes out a cigarette. Her hands shake slightly as she lights it. Pianist’s fingers. Pale and slim. Bruises on the knuckles, now. I have a meeting with the dean tomorrow, she says. About reinstatement.
She takes a sharp drag from the cigarette. He watches her lips for a long while. The curve of them. The way they purse as she breathes in, then out. Red like blood. Split from some old fight. Eleanor, he says. There is something in his voice. He reaches across the table. She doesn’t take it. You don’t get to look at me like that, Chan, she says. You of all people. There is something in her voice too.
He withdraws his arm. Stands up. The chair scrapes against the tile. I should go, he says. Early class tomorrow. She looks up at him. Black hair over her eyes. Bangs too long again. He does not brush it back. He does not even think of it. O-chem? she asks. Yeah, he says. Good luck, she says. That one’s a killer. He nods. He leaves. The door slams behind him.
- The Circling Year, V.C. Mah
When you realised that the door wouldn’t open, it took everything in you not to swear aloud. The lack of air-conditioning was beginning to make itself evident, and with it, the realisation that this situation was looking slightly dire. Like, missing-the-last-bus dire. Sleeping-on-the-floor dire. Your-mom-calling-the-police dire. You checked your phone for what seemed like the thousandth time: three percent battery, no reception, the clock above Angelica Schuyler’s face ticking down the seconds until 10PM– when the security guard signed off for the day.
Today had run late even by Drama Club standards. As club president, your life– and your portfolio– was on the line if the club couldn’t get it together in time for SYF, so you’d made the executive decision to keep the cast back for a minute to run over their blocking again. A minute turned into thirty which turned into an hour, and to top it all off, you’d had to double back to pick up the hoodie you’d forgotten on the chair. You’d been with your co-captain Bahiyah, of course, but she lived in Woodlands, and it would probably have been punishable in court to keep her back any later than this.
All this to say– nobody was coming to save you, and it wasn’t anybody’s fault but yours. You rattled the knob, kicked at the door, then tried fruitlessly to pick the lock with a paperclip, mentally running through all the prayers you remembered (at some point you’d resorted to the Nicene Creed.) As 10PM came and went, the door remained infuriatingly shut. You gave it a final, half-hearted kick– more out of irritation than anything– then stepped back, your breath sounding awkward and heavy in the warm, dark silence. Please, you thought, or maybe said aloud: for the first time that night you didn’t know who you were praying to, or if you were praying to anyone at all. Please, please, please–
Behind you, something rustled.
Whirling around, you stuck your phone out in front of you like a cop in a movie. A woman was leaning against the mirrored wall with her arms crossed, hair thrown over one shoulder. The green-white-gold of the emergency lights glinted off her sunglasses.
You couldn’t breathe. You couldn't feel your body. The whole world seemed to be electrified. “Gin?”
The woman– the mirage– Gin stepped closer. In the panelled mirrors there could have been ten thousand of her. Silently, she crossed the dance studio (she was standing next to you, oh my god she was next to you) and unlocked the door. Fluorescent light from outside sliced through the room in a neat triangle, narrowly avoiding her face. Up close you could see what the grainy newspaper scans couldn’t show you: the softness of her flannel shirt; the frizziness of her straightened hair; how she moved with a straight-backed, regal grandeur that you’d thought only existed on the stage. She’d make a good Enjolras, probably. A charming young man, capable of being terrible. It felt silly that you were thinking about theatre now, of all things, but you didn’t know what else to think about. There was no rational explanation for anything here, no verses or prayers that applied.
Then she stepped out the door, and was gone.
When you got home you screamed into your pillow for, like, thirty minutes. Obviously.
None of this felt real, but you weren’t complaining. You’d already spent most of your teenage years chasing Gin, or the shadow of her, at least– Springsteen, Sappho, Seeger, and a UC Berkeley sweatshirt from H&M that was 99% plastic and probably made from slave labour. (She’d have hated it. You bought it anyway.) The haunting, or the rehearsal-induced stress hallucination, whatever it was, felt like a culmination of all of your insanity over the past few years, every impossible daydream you’d ever had, God going THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF THE TOP 0.001% FANS OF VIRGINIA M., PLEASE ENJOY THIS SPECIAL REWARD. Did you deserve it? Debatably. Did you understand anything about how this was happening? Nope. But she was Gin, and she was here, and you weren’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
So the next time you met her, it all felt pretty familiar. It was 7 P.M., the liminal time between the sun setting and the streetlights switching on, your whole HDB estate drowning in that dull sapphire blue of twilight. Your block’s lift was broken– of course it was broken– so this was how you found yourself fumbling for the railing in an unlit stairwell, steeling yourself to hike up the nine floors to get back home. Your phone buzzed in your pocket. Bahiyah again, probably. She’d finally figured out how to use Photoshop, and had been blowing up the drama club EXCO group chat all day with pictures of Lin Manuel Miranda edited into places that he shouldn’t be. Which– again– you weren’t complaining.
You had made it up the first flight of stairs and were turning onto the landing when you saw the figure: slouched against the wall with her arms crossed, her hair worn the same way, her glasses still on. Like she’d been copy-and-pasted from your last memory of her. Even in the darkness you would have known her anywhere.
Gin cocked her head slightly when she saw you approaching. “You knew my name,” she said, without so much as a hello. “How?”
You pulled yourself together enough to flash her your best, job-interview smile. Regardless if this was some sort of hallucination, or a dream, or even, somehow, reality– this was Virginia M. In any possible universe, there was no way you’d let yourself mess this up. “I’m familiar with your work. I loved The Circling Year.” You told her your name, then said, “Nice to meet you. Thanks for saving me earlier.”
“I was surprised, that’s all. Only my friends called me that.” Her voice was clipped and monotone, with the kind of accent you only heard on Netflix. She straightened herself up, turned the corner, and began to climb the stairs.
Oh. Okay. You were expecting her to say something normal, something you could respond to, like, No problem, or, Thanks for being a fan, or, How the hell did you even find that book. But you could work with this. “Sorry. I saw it in a zine–” Now you sounded even more like a stalker. Great. “How did you get here?”
“You tell me. You’re the one who called.”
“Called?”
She shrugged. Then, like that answered literally anything: “You go to Huxley?”
You tried to make your voice as casual as humanly possible under the current circumstances. “Yeah, I’m in Sec 4. 402.” You didn’t know why you told her your class– it wasn’t like it’d mean anything to her– but you didn’t know what you were saying in general. In your pockets your hands were shaking like mad. You really hoped she didn’t notice it.
“What class was I in? I don’t remember. Somewhere on the fifth floor– we never stopped complaining about the stairs.” Her lip twisted into something that might have been a smile. She turned her head to hide it, or else to look out at the city: the identical buildings, the scattered square boxes of light, the laundry billowing from the bamboo poles. “It's funny. When I was your age I swore I’d never come back to this place as long as I lived. To give her credit, though, I guess I never did.”
You stopped in your tracks. “You’re–”
Virginia stopped, too. The line of her jaw was sharp with shadow. “Did you think otherwise?”
“It hasn’t been that long since 1980. You wouldn’t even be sixty. I guess I just assumed that, I don’t know, you’d just fallen off the grid. Changed your name. Gotten married–” Okay, maybe not, seeing how she winced at the mere mention of it.
“1981. Ellis Street. Car crash.” She’d started to climb again, two steps at a time. You scrambled to keep up. “You didn’t know?”
“I couldn’t find a lot of information about you on the Internet. Not a lot of people knew of you.” You’d meant it lightly, but it didn’t come out like you’d hoped. Virginia’s expression shifted behind her glasses. “Not in a bad way! You’re like– a hidden gem. A secret.” Or, as Nguyen, 2016 bluntly put it: lost .
Virginia didn’t say anything. When she finally did, it was bitter, almost a snap. “Do you think I wanted to be a secret?”
“Of course not!” Good going, genius. Wouldn’t you be bitter too, if you were in her shoes? A single printing, a couple of copies, your life’s work turned into nothing more than a badly-scanned PDF bouncing around shady Google Drives. “I didn’t mean to imply that– what I was going to say– What did you want?”
With her glasses on, you could never tell whether she was meeting your eyes. “Something simple.”
The two of you both knew what she was talking about. Chapter 25. Daniel, a microphone, a packed Sproul Plaza. What we are calling for is something very simple. “To break each binding iron chain. To bring dictators to their knees. To hear the death knell of this tyrant state ring through every jailhouse and factory floor. To raze it. To raise it. To start again.”
Her mouth opened and closed like she was about to say something. But you'd never know what— in the manner of all good dreams, that was when the light kicked on, a flash so bright and sudden that you instinctively squeezed your eyes shut. When you opened them again, green spots dancing in your vision, the whole world had been illuminated. Familiar details came finally into view: a laundry rack there, an air-con unit here. The metal sign reading Level 9 of 9 . The empty space beside you, and the air that rushed in to fill it.
Later, checking DRAMA EXCO ‘16 (NO TEACHERS) (MORE SWAG):
Lin Manuel Miranda in a bathtub.
Lin Manuel Miranda playing every single role in Hamilton at the exact same time.
Lin Manuel Miranda T-posing ominously at the end of the supermarket aisle.
Lin Manuel Miranda in your bathtub, like, specifically.
Lin Manuel Miranda on the beach with a silly little drink and a book in his hand.
Lin Manuel Miranda interviewed on the radio, saying: The past isn’t done with us. Ever, ever, ever.
Lin Manuel Miranda except he's not Lin Manuel Miranda anymore and his voice is cracking and the stage is spinning and the person in the dress circle with a GoPro is fighting for their life to keep his face in focus— America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me / You let me make a difference / A place where even orphan immigrants can leave their fingerprints…
The stage, turning. The actor gone from sight.
James looked at him with his quizzical, half-twisted smile. “You’re nuts,” he said kindly. “You’re not black, white, or native American. You live here. You probably have to live here for the rest of your life.”
Joo Kwan howled. “Well, for God’s sake, that’s it, don’t you see?”
- Baby You Can Drive My Car, Claire Tham
virginia m’s crash course for the 21st century
- the schuyler sisters - hamilton obc (ohmygosh u r so angelica)
- friends - chase atlantic
- she looks so perfect - five seconds of summer
- do i wanna know - arctic monkeys
- sweater weather - the neighbourhood
- what is this feeling - wicked obc
- wild - troye sivan
- new americana - halsey
- dead girl walking - heathers west end cast (hehehehe sorry :P)
note: of course this isnt all of the music that was released in the last 35 years lah its just the music that reminds me of u ^_^ hehe hope u enjoy!!!
(note^2: ohmygosh does she even know how to use spotify do i need to burn this on a tape recorder)
(note^3: remember to google how to use a tape recorder)
(note^4: also remember to google how to get a tape recorder)
Okay, okay, so here was the truth: The Circling Year, by all accounts, wasn’t a terribly good novel. Historically important? Sure. Groundbreaking? Sure. “One of the first written works to truly grapple with what it means to be Asian-American” (Chan, 2014)1? Probably. Good? Um. Well. As she would say, goodness was a culturally imperialist construct.
It was the kind of book you could only find on accident: you’d stumbled across it in the depths of some dubiously-legal website with a name along the lines of free-ebooks-online.net.com, and only downloaded it because you thought you could use it as research for your Modern AU Les Miserables fanfiction. The plot itself was simple. Over the course of one year, three students at an unnamed university in California– Daniel Chan, Eugene Kwon, and Eleanor Takahashi– are drawn into a passionate, intellectual friendship, where they begin to question the realities of the world that they live in. In practice, though, it was basically just 600 pages of political theory. “It is obvious that Mah is trying to convey important points about the struggles of Orientals under the Carter administration,” read one particularly scathing review in the campus newspaper (Abraham, 1980)2. “But her characters are so busy being points that they forget to be people.”
What you liked about it wasn’t the points (you’d skimmed through half the speeches), but the people, poorly characterised and ill-defined as they were: how much they loved their cause, how much they had loved each other. Over the course of the story they seemed to merge slowly into one unbroken body, always draping themselves over each other, whispering in each other’s ears, intertwining their fingers together, touching and not-touching and not-not-touching. Locked in orbit like some celestial system.
You never ended up writing that fanfiction, but you fell fast and hard for the Circling Year.
1. You’d always been confused by this. Was she even “Asian-American”? When she’d written the book, she hadn’t even been in America for three years: less than a tenth of her entire life, if you did the maths. (You didn’t like to do the maths. Not because you didn’t like the concept of maths. It was just depressing to remember that three years had almost been a whole tenth of her life.)
But you couldn’t really blame Prof. Chan. From Virginia herself–
America looks at us and names us Foreign. Names us Homeless. Sees our darkhairdarkeyesyellowskin and spits. But we shout in response that we belong. This is our home and our country just as much as any White man’s. [...] The story of America is constantly telling itself. Which is to say that the story of America is the story of me and you. Which is to say it is imperative that we as Americans must tell our own story because the rest of our country sure as Hell can’t be trusted to tell it for us.
- PEONY, Issue 1, 1979
In your defense, you weren’t trying to be MAGA about it– you weren’t about to go around dictating who could and couldn’t identify with a country just based on their citizenship, or how long they’d lived there, etc, etc, etc. (You would know.) In 1979, calling herself American would have been an almost revolutionary act. Still, it wasn’t like America was exactly wanting for authors, was it? You just cared about representation. History. Accurate Wikipedia pages. Things of that sort.
2. This guy was just harsh on everyone. You Googled his name and he’d written another review for Toni Morrison’s Beloved that called it “meandering rubbish”. So.
“ἦλθες, ἔγω δέ σ᾿ ἐμαιόμαν.”
Virginia was leaning against one of the street-lamps, haloed by a circle of light that wavered, shadowless, in the puddles on the ground. Small bugs spun around her head: vultures soon descending.
“Hi.” You laughed a little uneasily, brushing a damp strand of hair behind your ear and hoping she didn’t notice that your concealer had totally melted off. It was a cool night, but the humidity more than made up for the temperature. The moment you’d stepped out of your student’s house it felt like you’d been dunked in a swimming pool. “I don’t speak Greek.”
“It means hello.” It didn't sound like it did, but you weren’t going to argue with her. “What’s the occasion?”
You told her about your part-time tutoring job as you walked down the pavement together. Tonight’s class had been with Javier, P4 Maths, a nice enough kid. The only annoying thing was that his house was in the middle of this vast confusing housing estate that made you walk for ages in order to get to the nearest MRT station– but you didn’t mind it all that much, honestly. You liked the quietness, how every roof was done up in a different shade of terracotta, how the whole place burst with riotous greenery: pot plants upon pot plants, overgrown gardens, the occasional low-hanging branch that you had to duck under like Indiana Jones. It didn’t feel like Singapore. But again, you didn’t know where else it could have been.
“This place’s changed a lot since I was a kid.”
Thrown from being cut off in the middle of your ramble (had she even been listening to you?), it took you a while to figure out what she was getting at. “You’re from Toa Payoh?”
“Grew up here. Well. Not here. Over at Caldecott. But close enough.”
“You never said you were Singaporean. Never wrote about it.”
Where did that sudden patriotism come from, anyway? Sure, you liked this country. You'd lived in it half your life. But you'd never harboured any strong feelings about it one way or another: it wasn't the kind of place that was designed to be felt strongly about. Besides, whenever you went out with your mom, people always looked past you like you were her maid, which– You tried not to dwell on it too much.
What you did know, though, was after you found out that Virginia was Singaporean, you couldn’t help but see her Singapore laid over yours like double-exposure film, a whole brilliant tangle of possibilities: she might’ve sat in the same classrooms you did, climbed the same stairs, rattled down the same roads in those old white buses with the windows down– might’ve, might’ve, might’ve, the absence of her making her present in every place. You’d read about something like this in one of those Young Scientist magazines as a kid: pareidolia, it was called. Or maybe just a haunting.
“There’s nothing here worth writing about.”
“No? What about–” Coldstore? Konfrontasi? Old white buses with the windows down?
“Didn’t interest me,” she said, and of course that shut you up. As you continued to walk, a black car rushed past, throwing up water in its wake.
“Funny story,” she began. “That night on Ellis– I was alone. I saw the car first. I could’ve moved. I didn’t. Afterwards the driver stopped, came out. He was crying. I thought for a moment that he would call someone, anyone. He didn’t, either. He was saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry as he got back into the car. To whom, I don’t know. Maybe he was still saying it as he drove off. Maybe he was still saying it for a long, long time.”
“You didn’t tell him you were still alive?”
“Wouldn’t have mattered.”
She said it with a flat finality that you didn’t really know how to respond to. You made the executive decision to switch topics. “If you didn’t leave the country, would you have—”
“Would I have died? At some point, obviously. I'm not a vampire. Probably sooner rather than later, considering how I was living in 1981.”
I imagine death so much– “Would you have regretted it?”
She was quiet for a long time, still looking straight ahead. You were beginning to think that she would never respond. Then she said, simply, “Yes.”
The administration claims to serve the students while selling our futures to Dow Chemical, to Lockheed Martin—
Cut, Eleanor says.
Eugene looks up from the flyer. Huh?
Cut it. No one gives a damn about corporations. Be bloody about it. Say war profiteers. Say merchants of death. Say, your tuition dollars fund the bombs that– She stops cranking. The mimeograph clatters to a stop.
Daniel starts. You okay? She examines her fingers. Dark and sticky. Exploded on you again? Eugene asks. Again, she says. Goddamn it. She wipes her hands cursorily. Rattles around in her satchel. Produces a little white bottle. Half-covered in ink, now. Opens it. Takes one.
El! Jesus!
What, Chan? she says. Gonna lecture me about proper use of prescription stimulants? Eugene pushes back his chair. Strides over. Give me one, babe, he says. Then, to Daniel: Don’t look at me like that. Five hundred more of these to print tonight. That's my boy, Eleanor says. She’s already shaking out a pill. His Adam’s apple bobs as it goes down. Daniel doesn’t watch it.
He shoots to his feet instead. This is– this is insane. You both need sleep. You’re going to kill yourselves. He’s gathering his things. Notebook. Wallet. Keys. Keys. Does he have his keys? There they are. His hands keep shaking. I should go.
Dan, Eugene says softly. Nobody calls him that but Eugene. He’s pulled out the Voice. Low and gravelly and pleading. Daniel swallows. I have a lab tomorrow, he says. Of course you do, Eleanor says. Now she’s on her feet, too. Eugene steps between them, puts a warm hand on Daniel’s arm. We need you here, he says. A brilliant smile. The tightening of his grip.
No, you need someone to write your flyers because you both failed English comp.
Wow, Eleanor says. Sure. Daniel winces. I didn't mean— but Eugene cuts him off. Lets go. He’s left crescents on Daniel’s skin. Yes, you did, he says. Go study for your lab or whatever it is that biochem majors do.
Daniel picks up his bag. Takes a step forward. Eugene’s eyes are very bright. Enough to burn. The heat of them on him. Daniel knows it’s not the pills. What happens when you get arrested?
Then I get arrested. Someone has to be first through the door. Someone has to show them we're serious.
And after? What happens to the movement then?
It survives. Maybe not in this form, but– that’s what movements do. They move on.
He sounds so sure. It breaks Daniel’s heart. Just promise me you’ll be careful tomorrow, okay? Both of you.
Careful doesn’t change anything. But thank you for the well-wishes.
- The Circling Year, V.C. Mah
The same dream again. The one with teeth.
Gasping for breath, you extracted yourself from your sheets, swinging your legs over the side of your bed. The flower-shaped IKEA lamp you’ve had since you were a kid drenched the room in a pure fluorescent pink. You could still see it as you shut your eyes, as you put your elbows on your knees and put your face into your hands. Pink and pink and pink all through: the hitch of your chest, the shake of your shoulders, the rising sourness at the back of your throat. You should probably turn it off, some distant part of your brain thought. Later.
The bed sagged under a weight that wasn’t yours. There was a rustling of fabric, the smell of cigarettes. You didn’t open your eyes. “V–”
“I’m here.” Monotone, like always. A statement of fact. Nothing more. “Cute room.”
You squeezed your eyes shut some more, trying to wrap your head around the existence of Virginia M in your room (!), on your bed (!!!). Flipping through your textbooks, rearranging your colour-coded pens, touching the Playbills you’d printed off the internet for shows you’d never get to watch (Heathers, Hamilton, Be More Chill), gazing out your grilled window into the second-floor dark. “You’re not supposed to be.” You broke off into something that might have been a laugh. A little tight, a little hysterical.
“Well,” she said, matter-of-fact, “you did call.”
Another laugh/cough/splutter into your hands. God, you probably looked like a mess. You were suddenly uncomfortably aware of the thinness of your clothes. “I didn’t! I didn’t ask for– I didn’t want–”
(But you had. Of course you had.)
“So I should’ve left you locked in the theatre?”
“No! I’m sorry. I just–” Open your eyes, the sensible part of your brain nagged. It’d only be polite. But you didn’t. “Gin?” Your voice was very small. A little girl in her childhood bed.
“Still here.”
“Iknowthere’ssomethingwrongwithme.” It came out in one breath. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there. At the back of my mind it’s always there. And I can trick people into thinking it isn’t, but it is, it always is, and one day someone’s going to see it, someone’s going to see me for what I am, and, um, and– oh God. God. I'm sorry.”
“Hey. Hey. Don’t–” She made a strangled little sound: you’d forgotten, again, that she barely knew you. And here you were, almost breaking down in front of her, the complete and total disaster that you were. When all of this was over you were going to walk off Changi Beach right into the ocean. “When are you going to university?”
The abruptness of it shocked a laugh out of you. “What?”
“When?” She wasn’t joking. Probably.
“Three years. Got to worry about O Levels first. Then A Levels. Law, hopefully, or business.”
“Have you considered going abroad?”
“Um. Like, if I get a scholarship? Maybe. I don’t know. Sorry, but what does that have to do with what we were– you know…”
“This country is a story that has been told to you.” Her voice was hurried. She sounded like she was reading off something she’d memorised, that she’d thought about for a long time. There was a sort of shyness to her suddenly, a sort of halting self-consciousness, that hadn’t ever been there before. Or perhaps you just hadn’t noticed it. “And in its telling there are things that have been made to seem impossible. Outside of narrative and of language. But they aren’t, not really. Not if you try. The world is very big, and this country is very small. There’s always going to be something out there that’s waiting for you. Um. Do you get it?”
Maybe. “No.”
She swallowed. Now she was the anxious one. The sound made your lungs tight with a feeling that wasn’t exactly smugness, but wasn’t not-smugness either. “The point is that you seem like a nice kid. This country is going to eat you alive. And I don’t want that to happen.”
“Why do you hate Singapore so much?” It wasn’t even this country that killed her, you thought, and loathed yourself for thinking it.
“I don’t. Believe me. Diana–”
It would’ve been less shocking if she’d punched you square in the chest. It wasn’t like you had anything against it: it was a perfectly fine name, you printed it on programs and wrote it on assignments and signed it on big looping letters on the front pages of your textbooks without any issue– but in her earnest, American voice, it sounded all wrong, all off-kilter.
“Don’t do that.”
She repeated your name like you hadn’t just told her not to, like it would be any better this time around. You flinched like you’d been slapped. “Leave me alone. Please.” You knew you were being a jerk, but you couldn’t stop yourself. Like the arc and falling of thrown things. Like the endless frozen moment between sense and reaction. Like a car without brakes, going very fast.
“Okay,” she said, then more quietly, “okay.” You could hear her stand up. The bed groaned. “Promise me you’ll think about it. Just– be true to yourself, okay? And what you really want.”
“Virginia.”
“You’ll figure it out someday.” And then she was gone. You laid back down on the bed and opened your eyes. Above you the pink fan was spinning in the middle of your pink ceiling, casting pink shadows on the wall.
You rolled over. You turned off the light.
—And he barely ever even spoke to her in real life?
—Yeah, just kind of… looked from afar.
—What was he waiting for?
—Perhaps for a stamp of approval.
Perhaps for the burgeoning of true desire.
Perhaps for a sign that her desire was built like his desire, a massive burrow of rooms filled with scurrying antpeople controlled by a massive unseen intelligence.
—Desire like that doesn’t exist.
—Ah but in days of old it was the only form they had of desire.
- We Are Slowly Dismantling Merit Bureaucracies, Reid Tang
Q: So what did you want, anyway?
A) If you were asked this question by anyone else, the first and most obvious answer would be: to act. To keep acting. To have your brain go “Bzz!” and your heart go “Wow!”. To tip yourself backwards into a role until it swallowed you, until there was no longer any separation between yourself and the character. To get caught up with your best friends in that glittering whirlwind of Line please! and quick change and honey lemon tea, of bows and bad karaoke and crying in the dressing room together after closing night.
[But theatre, after all, was inherently ephemeral: The curtain came down. The house lights went up. The government cut your funding, cut your script, called the whole thing off two hours before. You’d read the news, you’d seen the graphs. Anywhere in the world, it was always going to be sink-or-swim. (Also, unfortunately, you enjoyed financial stability.) Still– it wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t as if they were going to put your picture up next to Lea Salonga anytime soon, but you could work weekends, do local productions, teach classes to kids. You could be an actress, you could be an adult, you could be happy. Theoretically. The impossible thing was–
You couldn’t say it. You couldn’t.]
B) Okay, but if you could. Problem sum. Purely hypothetical. What if you were someone who was braver, older, more American, more like Virginia; what if, right now, like, literally right now, you called for her or cried for her or ran to her or whatever way there was to master the impossible alchemy of the schedule that summoned her; what if you knelt at her feet and said I’m sorry, said, We both know that I know why you’re here, said I prayed, and you came, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because you were trapped and it was dark and you wanted someone to hear you, anyone at all. God half-off, second-hand God, anything in the shape of Him. Because long before that music room you were already there. Because He hadn’t answered, but Virginia had.
[So much for the unsayable. There were words for this– lots of them– and of course you knew them all by heart: idolatry, heresy, the Big Unforgivable One. I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. Was that all this was? A Biblical testing of your resolve, your sins made flesh and welded against you?
If it was, you weren’t winning this one. You were doing whatever the opposite of winning was. You were definitely not being God’s strongest soldier right now. You’d folded like wet tissue paper the moment she showed up, and spent the past few weeks trying frantically to justify it all, when all this time you knew, you knew, it was too good to be true. Since when had you ever gotten anything you wanted without some hitch, some consequence, some unpayable debt? And, after all, she’d been famously atheist her entire life. Religion is the opiate of the masses or something like that. Or, in her case, from Chapter 18 of The Circling Year: “a Western colonisation of the Oriental mind.”
Despite all this– the fate of her soul, the trick of the light– despite the possibilities and the problem sums and everything else: when you went down onto your knees on the linoleum tile, the only prayer you could conceivably imagine coming out of your mouth was Stay. Please stay. Stay with me. ]
C) So maybe the truth was as simple as this: how everything you’d ever done had been in pursuit of a way out from yourself. Maybe the truth was that you wanted nothing more than to become the you in some self-insert story, in some x-reader imagine. A shifting and nameless vessel of light, the conduit for someone else's wildest fantasies, for all the things they were too ashamed to say out loud. Not a body so much as a vocabulary of organs— your eyes here, your hands here— bound together by nothing except its capacity for desire. Maybe it was just that Virginia was tall and thin and Chinese and she looked better in a tie than you ever would in your life and even in newspaper print her bone structure looked devastatingly architectural, all marble and gargoyles and flying buttresses, evident signs of some higher power. Maybe it was because she had to fly to the US to learn what it was like to be oppressed when all the time she had had Berkeley money, GCB money, Caldecott money. Maybe all of that was why some part of you had always longed to cut her open and climb into her, to take up residence inside her chest, to hear the thump-thump-thump of her heart against her ribcage and nestle into it until nothing left of you remained.
[Maybe.]
At five-fifty in the morning, Huxley’s seemed like a post-apocalyptic version of itself. You were never guai enough or unlucky enough to have to be in school at this time before, so you’d never noticed how the trees cast stretched-out shadows through the concrete corridors, how the vending machines glowed like beacons in the dark, how the canteen looked when the lights were on but every table sat empty, every store boarded, even the drinks store aunty not yet in. Sure, you’d been in school after sunset plenty of times, but this was different. That was cool, fun, rebellious, a wacky Night In The Museum adventure. School before dawn just felt like it was holding its breath.
You shouldered your bag again as you made your way up to the fifth floor. It didn’t take a lot of walking around to find the classroom that you were looking for. You knocked, then decided better of it, and pushed open the door. “Virginia?” The Virginia in question was currently sitting cross-legged on one of those little blue tables with the wonky legs, squinting at somebody’s Social Studies homework like it had personally offended her (and in all likeliness probably had). She looked up at you, and–
Oh. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, not today. In the unlit room her face was small and pale. Her expression shifted, still inscrutable. She put the book aside. “Gin,” she corrected. “I don’t mind.”
“Um. Hi, Gin.” After so long, it sounded strange in your mouth.
“Are you– feeling better?” She sounded like she was reading from a psychology textbook. It was oddly endearing. You shrugged, dropped your bag onto one of the tables, and sat down opposite her. “Do you want to, uh, talk about it?”
That got a shudder out of you. “No! I mean, I’m sorry I freaked out on you and asked you to leave, that was super uncool of me. I just– I don’t– Let’s not. Please.”
“Okay,” she said, in the same inscrutable way she had last time. Then, “Is that a Berkeley sweater?”
The one and only sweater you’d ever had cause to buy. You tugged at a loose thread on the hem: in about a month or two the whole thing would probably unravel in your hands. “I haven’t been to Berkeley. I just bought it for fun.”
“You should go. You’d like it.”
“Only if you can show me around.”
That half-smile again. “If I could, I would. Believe me. Knowing them they probably haven’t replaced the heating in Unit 2.”
“That’s Eugene’s building, right?”
She tilted her head to the side a little. “Well. It was my dorm first. Was that in the book?”
“In Chapter 3. When they’re going to his room, you said they went up Bowditch and turned right onto Haste. I looked it up on Google Maps, and that was the only place that fit.”
“Google— Okay.”
You stopped swinging your legs. “Sorry.”
“No, it's… ” It took a while for her to find the word. “Flattering. The kind of reader I wanted when I was young.”
Even now she did look young. Was young, actually. Twenty-five and drowning in her flannel and dead, dead, dead. Perched on the table, her feet barely meeting the ground, she seemed a little bit like a bird about to take flight. “I have a couple of questions about the book,” you said. Here was the careful primness in your tone again: the job-interview voice, the fending-off-relatives-at-Christmas voice, the impressing-the-minister voice. As if she was a regular writer and you were a regular reader and this was a meet-and-greet like any other.
“Shoot.”
“Why did you end it like that?” By That you meant with the fall of the campus movement, with the tear gas and the tasers and the gunshots fired, with Eugene vanished and Eleanor an alcoholic and Daniel lost to the undiscovered country of grad school. With Eleanor, at the very end, clearing out the room in which they’d gathered– stacking the chairs, shutting the blinds, turning off the lights– until it was just another classroom in a corridor in a building in a university, ready to be used again and again. With the whole book becoming nothing but a tragedy (Nguyen, 2016) , a fleeting, impermanent gasp (Chan, 2014) , an exercise in futility (Andersen, 1980) .
She sighed in a manner that suggested she got a lot of questions like that when she was alive. “It was inevitable.”
“Didn’t they–” love each other? “I mean, what about their friendship?”
“The personal is always political.” Now she was looking at you as she spoke, capital-L Looking– almost staring you down, really, her brown eyes dark in the low light. For a single, dizzying second, you wondered how she’d never believed in God. Had she never seen herself in the mirror? You swallowed and looked away. Maybe you did miss the glasses.
“That’s not an answer,” you said finally. “That’s a slogan.”
“Well. They’re fundamentally opposed political consciousnesses, right?” She crossed and uncrossed her legs. “Daniel thinks he can fix the system. Eleanor sees it for what it is, but can’t bring herself to change it. Eugene is the only real revolutionary. The only member of the trio who escapes Society. The only one with a happy ending. So their friendship was doomed from the start. If it was even a friendship at all.”
“That’s depressing.”
“The world’s depressing. Hate to break it to you, kid.”
You tried and failed to come up with something that would refute the first statement, so you decided to try the second one instead. “I’m sixteen. Not a kid.”
“That’s what I would’ve said when I was your age.” She laughed: the first time you’d ever heard her laugh. Low and gravelly. “You're a lot like her.”
“Who?”
“Me at sixteen.”
“You talk about her like she’s a different person.”
It didn’t seem like she had blinked once since you entered the room. Did ghosts not have to blink? Was she just Like That? “Maybe she is.”
“If she was here–” you swallowed around the lump in your throat– “What would you tell her?”
A shrug. “That the personal is political, and the political is personal. That denying political affiliation is in itself a political act.” From where you were sitting, you could see movement in the corridor. She didn't seem to notice it. Nor did she notice you shifting forward, leaning in, fingers scrabbling for purchase on the edge of the table. Your sneakered foot almost touched her Docs. Cigarette smoke, everywhere. “That America is not perfect, that Berkeley is not perfect, but she’ll fall in love with both of them anyway: the music and the movies and the flings and the friends but mostly the white-hot surge of being a part of something that matters. Something that swallows her with its enormity. Something that makes a real, tangible difference. It will be the only place that she will ever feel like she belongs to. The only country she’ll ever be able to call home.” Out of the corner of your eye, whatever was moving was coming closer. “That one day in the future, she’ll get to San Francisco. And she won’t get better, and she won’t get free, but one day she’ll get very, very close.”
The movement coalesced into the shape of a girl which coalesced into the shape of– against all odds– Bahiyah, squinting through the shutters and knocking on the door, saying what’re you doing up here and we were looking for you and di? di are you okay– You wrenched your focus back to Gin, your heart a living, traitorous thing. Thump thump thump. Like a bad novel. Had she noticed it? She couldn’t not have. Say it, your brain screamed, let her know– Say what? Know what? All of a sudden the room had gone airless. Like the stage before the curtain rose, a thousand invisible eyes on you. Like those few precious seconds between alarm and awakening.
Stay. Please stay. Stay with me.
“And what would you tell me?” Your voice was hoarse.
“You, princess?” Reaching out, she pushed a strand of loose hair back behind your ear. Her hand came away cold. “Nothing you don't already know.”
The door slammed open. For a brief moment Gin was drenched in pure and brilliant light: the moles scattered across her cheeks, the two dents on each side of her nose, the obvious, impossible, terrifying fondness in her face. She didn’t move. She didn’t even flinch. Just closed her eyes, smiled that old half-smile, and waited for the end.
The university-industrial complex perpetuates systems of oppression through— Eleanor recites, wincing. Oh god, who wrote this?
I did, Eugene says, faux-scandalised. Of course, Eleanor says. I think it's good, Daniel says, earnestly. You would, she says. Eugene rolls over to grab the pamphlet from Eleanor, his shoulder brushing against Daniel's leg. Daniel doesn't move away. Nowhere to move. The dorm rooms in this block are tiny. What would you write instead? Eugene asks.
Eleanor takes another swig from the bottle. She barely even seems tipsy. Hey, dickheads, stop killing people, she says. That gets a laugh out of them. But Eugene snaps upright, suddenly energetic. But that's it, man. We have to translate that feeling into something they can't ignore. When I read about what's happening in Vietnam, in our own cities, I feel like I'm going to explode. Like my skin can't contain it. He’s gesturing again. Almost knocks over the wine. Daniel catches the bottle: their fingers overlap. Oh, he says, thrown for a moment, Thanks. A brief pause, then– That's why we need people like you. People they don't expect. When you speak at the rally—
What? Daniel says. I can’t. I– I have midterms.
Eugene leans in. Daniel is suddenly aware of how close they are. Eugene’s breath so close he can feel it. Rough dorm room carpet on their knees, rough stubble on his face. The air conditioner broken yet again. That's what they want, man, Eugene says. Almost a whisper. Keep you so busy with tests you can't see what's really happening. University-industrial complex, remember?
He’s right, Eleanor adds. She’s leaning in too, eyes dark. Alcohol and amber. They're counting on our good behaviour.
Daniel looks at Eleanor looking at Eugene looking at Daniel. Okay, he says. He takes another drink. It burns all the way down. Jesus, he needs a cigarette. Tell me about this rally.
- The Circling Year, V.C. Mah
“You were sitting in the dark,” Bahiyah whispered to you during assembly. “Alone. Staring into nothing. What was that?”
“Nothing lah,” you said. “I was just being emo.”
“In a random classroom? Aren’t there better places to be emo?”
“Okay, but, like, the vibes.”
“Girls. Please pay attention to the announcements.”
“Sorry miss."
“Sorry.”
We have our dead. We let them go.
- City Hall, Yvonne Koh
After that morning, you never saw Gin again. This wasn’t really surprising to you. What was surprising, though, was that you never read the Circling Year again: you tried once, but to your shock you found yourself agreeing more with Abraham, 1980 than you ever had before. All you could pay attention to were the plotholes, the clunky pacing, the thinness of the characters, no more than mouthpieces. You felt bad putting it down, but you couldn’t make yourself finish it. You told yourself it was just growing up.
So what could you do but to keep living? You got the club a Distinction for SYF. Stepped down from EXCO. Did your O Levels. Did your A Levels. Got into SMU Business–you never got your exchange year, but that was fine. Got a sensible job at a local bank. Cut your hair. Grew it out. Taught kids at church in your free time. Tried dating. Failed spectacularly. All the years that passed seemed to be no more than days in a single unbroken summer: the flat blue sky, the flooded roads, the thermometer racing up and up. And as you got further and further from sixteen, that week started feeling more and more unreal to you, anyway, until it seemed like a mere dream, maybe, or a hallucination. It probably didn’t help that you hadn’t told anyone about it, either. Not even Bahiyah. You’d considered bringing it up at confession, but what would you say? That you’d made up the whole thing from scratch, tricked yourself into believing your own fairytale?
This was what you were thinking about, more or less, as you pulled into the parking garage in central Berkeley. The rental Toyota had a little pair of dice attached to the rearview mirror, and they swayed and clinked as you parked, grabbed your handbag, and got out. You weren’t supposed to be here, not really. You were supposed to be considering grad school, getting fussed over by your Tita Dolores, splurging on unethical tickets for non-equity tours. But you would be lying to say that this diversion wasn’t planned out as methodically as a murder. It would be funny, that was all. What was the purpose of making Real Adult money (AKA Big Girl Money, Girl in Finance Money, Plane Tickets To San Francisco Money, etc. etc.) if you weren’t able to indulge the bit once in a while?
The plan worked well enough for a while. Here was the library with the mimeograph machine. Here was the record store where Eugene worked part-time until he decided working was counterrevolutionary. Here was Sproul Plaza, Sater Gate, Founder’s Rock, the Campanile. You took pictures, fought through tourists, felt like a tourist yourself. It felt stupid, sure, and slightly pointless, but it was for the Bit. It was all just for the Bit. A laying to rest of your teenage self.
You were thinking that that would make a good caption for your eventual Instagram post when you found yourself, like you’d dreamed of so many years ago, walking up Bowditch and turning right onto Haste. You stopped on the corner of the street and looked up. It was an ordinary building, just like any other building you’d seen that day, big glass windows shielded by skinny, yellowing trees. So this was Cunningham. Above you students were going about their days, each room containing a life you’d never know. Perhaps in one of them there was another Daniel and Eugene and Eleanor, tangled on the floor together, not knowing how doomed they truly were. You waited to be impressed. The feeling never came. You took a picture of the building, put your phone back in your pocket, and started walking back to your car.
If I could–
Classical. Classical. She likes classical, right? Everyone likes classical. Man, this place is a mess. Crates upon crates upon crates. Nowhere at all to walk. He’ll get stuck in here and starve to death. Then he’ll really be late to O-Chem.
A voice comes from behind the counter, low and bored. Classical's in the back corner. But she doesn't want classical. Daniel jumps. He didn’t notice he was thinking out loud again. Only people buying presents look that lost, the voice continues. And you've checked the price on every record you've touched, so it's not for yourself.
Showing off again, huh, someone else says. Asian girl at the discount bin. Pink lips and curtain bangs. Shut up, Eleanor, the voice replies. The boy it belongs to looks up from his book. Slim, broad-shouldered. Hair worn long. Converse on the counter. And he’s Asian, too. Daniel remembers him. You’re the guy with the clipboard. Yesterday. Dining hall. A petition about– farm workers? The boy looks pleased with himself. You signed it.
You remember that?
You asked questions. Most people sign to make me go away.
Just wanted to make sure you’re not, you know, using my signature for bank fraud or anything.
My lawyers have advised me not to take any positions regarding theft from financial institutions.
The girl– Eleanor– clears her throat. Who’s the lucky lady? she asks. Sister? Girlfriend? Daniel blinks. Right. Records, he thinks. He’s here for the records. Oh, um. Sister. Sister. No girlfriend. She’s in high school. She likes... whatever high school girls like? Eleanor rolls her eyes. You’re adorable. Eugene, help him.
Eugene comes out from behind the counter. He’s taller than Daniel expected. All tight corded muscle. He moves close to Daniel, reaching past him. Their shoulders brush. He’s murmuring now. Almost to himself. Pulling records out, putting them back. Joan Baez? Maybe not. You look like your sister might be more...
Daniel is very still. Breath on the back of his neck. Tobacco and sandalwood.
A record is finally selected. Joni Mitchell. Ladies of the Canyon. This one, he says. Trust me. Daniel takes it. The weight of it in his hands. How much— he begins.
Three dollars, Eugene says. But I'll give you the staff discount. Eleanor says, You can't keep giving everyone the staff discount. Eugene says, I can. If they sign petitions. To Daniel, he says, You've earned it.
Thanks, Daniel says, and immediately feels stupid about it.
I’m here most afternoons, Eugene says. Well. Both of us are. Come by whenever.
- The Circling Year, V.C. Mah
You got all the way back to the car before you started to cry.
It didn’t happen immediately. You got into the car, put your bag down, locked the door, started the ignition, trying to ignore the way your hands shook, then– Then. The sourness at the back of your throat, the whole world beginning to blur. What were you doing? What was wrong with you? Why, of all places, here, now? You needed to keep it together, for God’s sake, you were a grown adult–
Who were you kidding?
You talk about her like she’s a different person.
Maybe she is.
But beneath the car and the handbags and the first class honours in finance management and the stupid fucking Plane Ticket Money nothing about you, the real, honest you, had changed at all in the last decade: you were, would always be, nothing more than a little girl in her childhood bed, pink light suffusing every corner of the room. Everyone knew it, everyone saw: your parents, your colleagues, your childhood friends, the kids you taught their bible verses, the boys off Bumble whose faces would drop when you flinched away from their touch at the end of the night. Especially the boys. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. Most of them listened. Some didn’t. Once you got a glass of wine thrown at you for your trouble. You rode the MRT the whole way back with a red stain on your dress. Looking back at that night the memory of it had turned glowy and blurred: it was like something that’d happen in some terrible 90s slice-of-life serial, shot in a city very far away. But you did like it. It seemed corny and self-pitying in equal parts to think that way, but you did. You had finally cracked the code to leaving your body, if only for that hour– for once in your life, your heart was a visible wound.
If I could–
Because, okay, fine: you knew now that what you wanted, what you had always wanted, was option D), a single, simple, selfish thing– to push Virginia Chui-laan Mah into some dark corner and hiss at her: Say the name. Say its name. No more this country, no more that place. Three syllables. That’s all. You spent eighteen years growing up here, you spent nine-tenths of your life here, isn’t there some part of you, some sixteen-year-old ghost, that belongs here, that can call it home? Tell me it’s not scorched land, that it’s not unsaveable, irredeemable: that there are good things within it, and if not that there will be good things one day, that a life can still be made here, a life with meaning, a real life. Gin, Ginny, Virginia– there, I’ve said it, now say mine– not the name of the body, but the one that’s–
Because you knew now that bodies, like countries, were constant acts of mythmaking, stories told and dictated and edited and retold. The only difference was that you could leave a country, sure– you could cross a border, shred your passport, disown your past– but you could never leave your body: your eyes or your nose or the colour of your skin would always mark you as an outsider, your tongue would always trip over the consonants and the vowels, and even in the swallowing crowd there would always be a chance of you being spotted, dragged out, interrogated. When did you get here? What is your purpose? When are you leaving?
Because you didn’t know how to be Singaporean, but you didn’t know how to be anything other than Singaporean, and it was the latter that scared you the most.
Because there was only one way out from yourself for good, and it was–
Because if I could, I would.
You drove back in a haze. Even the rush hour traffic couldn’t bother you. By the time you got out of Oakland, it had turned dark, then drizzly. It would’ve been cold outside by now. Jacket weather. Sweater weather. When you reached San Francisco, you didn’t continue on the Embarcadero to get to your Holiday Inn, like your GPS said, but instead turned onto Howard St. Then Fremont. Then Front. Then Pine. Then Van Ness Ave. The buildings were low, stout. Brown and grey brick, criss-crossed by fire escapes. Through the patter of rain on the windshield of the rental car the streetlights seemed to arc out like angels. Ellis wasn’t that bad of a street, all things considered: in another world you would have gotten out and tried that cute Vietnamese restaurant down the road. But this was the only world you’d get. All possibilities and impossibilities collapsed into this single moment, this single life, this single choice that was never a choice.
You knew that this was a stupid decision in every possible aspect. That you could never come back from what you were about to do. That you were literally in the middle of San Francisco and could very well kill an innocent person with– whatever this was, this insane, impractical, selfish dream. You knew that. But you weren’t you anymore, not really. Just the thing with teeth. The unnameable absence. The vessel of light that desire flowed through.
The light turned red. The cars began to cross, then the trucks. Big hulking things. Immovable. Invincible. Slowly, at first, then faster. In another world you would be praying. For forgiveness, maybe, or salvation. But you didn’t pray anymore.
I imagine death so much / it seems more like a memory–
You hit the gas.
If as a child I’ve said
“one day I shall have no home”
nearing that hour of the
day, prompted by
that voice, & partly in
answer, now it is said
over & again
echoing everywhere, creeping like lizards
the lostness that 20 years later has
fetched me here.
- Kampong Bahru, 1975, Wong May