where they’d gone. His attention to clothes extended even to me, and growing up, I was always well dressed. My friends said I was lucky to have such a generous stepfather, but I knew it was all his own vanity. He was a collector and we were his acquisitions.
I’d never told Shin how I felt about his father. I didn’t have to.
* * *
When my mother and I had first moved in, I’d been amazed at how strict my new stepfather was with Shin. He seemed to expect absolute obedience. At home, Shin barely spoke unless he was spoken to; he was a shadow of the boy that I came to know outside the house. In fact, I was rather surprised at how popular Shin was. Knots of children appeared every day to play with him. Since they were all boys, he didn’t bother to introduce me but simply ran off. That impish, excited look on his face was never seen in the house, and soon I discovered why.
Shin had gone off one afternoon while I had to stay behind, pinching the roots off an enormous pile of fat, crisp bean sprouts. I didn’t like them, but my stepfather did, and so my mother often fried them with salted fish.
While I gloomily picked away, my stepfather came home. He walked silently through the kitchen, then checked the courtyard, his nostrils turning white with anger. Shin had forgotten to bag and weigh the drying piles of tin ore. When he finally returned, his father took him to the back and caned him for every pile he’d forgotten.
The cane was four feet long and as thick as a man’s thumb, nothing like the weak rattan switch that my mother occasionally disciplined me with. Seizing Shin by the collar, his father wound his arm back as far as it would go. There was a hiss, then an explosive crack that resounded through the courtyard. Shin’s knees buckled. A choked cry squeezed out of his throat. I tried to tell myself that he deserved it, but by the second stroke, I was weeping.
“Stop!” I screamed. “He’s sorry! He won’t do it again!”
My stepfather looked at me in utter disbelief. For an instant I was terrified that he would cane me, too, but he glanced at his new wife who appeared, white-faced, behind me, and slowly put the cane down. He didn’t say a word, but went back into the store.
That night Shin cried and I couldn’t bear it. I pressed my mouth against the wooden wall that separated us.
“Does it hurt?”
He didn’t reply, but the sobs intensified.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said at last.
“Do you need ointment?” I had some Tiger Balm in my room, the all-purpose Chinese salve rumored to contain boiled tiger bones. It claimed to cure everything from mosquito bites to arthritis.
There was a pause. “All right.”
I slipped out into the dark corridor. Though I knew my stepfather and mother were safely in their bedroom at the front of the shophouse, I had to steel myself before opening the door to Shin’s small room. It was a mirror image of my own, the beds reversed against the wall. He was sitting up in bed. In the moonlight, he looked very young and small, even though we were about the same size. I unscrewed the jar of Tiger Balm, and in silence, helped him rub it on the welts on his legs. When I was done, he seized my sleeve.
“Don’t go.”
“Just for a bit, then.” There’d be trouble if I were discovered, but I lay down next to him. He curled up like a small animal, and without thinking, I patted his hair. I thought he might object, but he only said, “My mother used to sit with me sometimes.”
“What happened to her?”
“She died. Last year.”
Only a year, I thought. My father, my real father, had been gone for three years. If my mother had owned a big shophouse like this, she wouldn’t have had to remarry, I told myself. I imagined the two of us growing potted orchids in the courtyard, making nian gao, the sweet sticky new year’s rice cake together as we’d done before. We would have been just fine by ourselves.
“When I grow up, I’ll never get married,” I said.
I thought he might make fun of me. After all, that was what girls were supposed to do. But Shin considered it seriously. “Then I won’t get married either.”