the other day,” she said. “It must have been awkward for you.”
Her very softness and meekness felt like a stab to the heart.
I tried to shrug it off. “Don’t worry about it.”
But she said seriously, “I really do love him, you know. We haven’t done it yet. I don’t want to tie him down if I got pregnant. But I will if he wants to.”
I wanted to shake her. What kind of thinking was this? My mother had warned me, stamped it into my head. Chastity was one of the few bargaining chips women had. No matter how good-looking Shin was, Fong Lan was a fool. And yet, part of me couldn’t help admiring her. She really did love him, I thought.
Haltingly, I tried to give her advice even though she was two years older than me. She listened patiently, then shook her head. “I know what it’s like in your family,” she said. So he’s really told her everything, I thought in amazed resentment. “But I want to make Shin happy. And if it means giving myself to him, that’s all right with me.”
Was that love or stupidity? But maybe that was just the hardheaded part of me, calculating my chances of survival. I wouldn’t give myself away to some man, become one of his possessions. Not without the economic assurance of a wedding ring. Even then, from what I could see of my mother’s choice, perhaps the price was too high.
* * *
I never did find out what happened with Fong Lan because not long after, Shin broke up with her. And strangely enough, when it was all over I found myself defending her.
“You’re supposed to be loyal and faithful,” I’d said, six months before Shin left for Singapore. We were sitting at the round marble-topped table studying. At least Shin was. I had nothing to prepare for, no university to go on to. “You’re not like your name at all.”
He’d barely looked up from his textbook. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you break up with Fong Lan? She cried buckets afterwards. I know she did.”
“Are you telling me to date her again?” He looked annoyed.
“She seems a lot more serious than whoever it is you’re with now,” I’d said defensively.
“And what about you? You think that being serious will change Ming’s mind?”
That was a low blow. Shin narrowed his eyes and turned a page. “Did Fong Lan ask you to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Then don’t meddle with what you don’t understand.” His face flamed, as though someone had pressed a burning brand across his cheekbones. “And stop talking about names! I have been faithful. As much as I can!”
Furious, he slammed his textbook shut and left.
* * *
After lunch at the canteen, we went back to the storeroom and started on the files. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; most of them were quite straightforward. But sorting out the pathology samples was a headache since they were in no semblance of order at all.
The collection was highly eccentric; I supposed that in this far-flung corner of the Empire, whoever was running the pathology department probably felt like God. We didn’t find the preserved head or blood-drinking grasshopper that Koh Beng had mentioned, but there was a two-headed rat, its naked tail a drifting worm in amber liquid. Dr. Rawlings’s predecessor, a Dr. Merton, had apparently promised a number of patients that they could have their body parts back after he’d studied them. These were denoted by a little red X in the corner of his crabbed records.
“Who’d want to come back for a gallbladder?” I said.
“Some people want to be buried whole,” Shin said seriously.
I shivered, remembering what the salesman, Chan Yew Cheung, had said when I’d danced with him—about witchcraft, and how a body must be buried in its original form to rest in peace.
“Here we go,” said Shin, reading from a file. “Finger, left ring, Indian male laborer infected with parasite. Preserved in formaldehyde.”
I combed through the shelves of specimens. Almost everything had been unpacked, and I still hadn’t seen any actual jars of severed fingers.
“Another one—right forefinger from a double-jointed female contortionist.”
“Not here, either,” I announced.
In fact, despite records indicating at least twelve amputated digits in the hospital collection, we could not locate a single one.
“How’s that possible?” I pored over the ledger again. People made jokes about doctors’ handwriting but in this case it was no laughing matter. Dr. Merton’s scrawl was a conga line of ants, the hasty loops of someone