The Black Isle by Sandi Tan Page A

soon as I felt the onset of the cold, leaving the note where my feet would have been. I wanted to see if Sister Yeung would behave any differently.
    She came, moving forward exactly as she’d done before. When she stretched out her silkworm-factory fingers, I thought she would pick up the note; instead her hands passed right through the paper, as if it were liquid. She squeezed the spot where my toes would have been and didn’t seem to register the note. She appeared to be operating in a completely different plane, not seeing things that were there and seeing things that were not. It felt as if I were watching a film loop—her actions were completely identical to the previous nights. I had to break her routine.
    “Sister Yeung!” I whispered. She didn’t turn but instead continued to gaze at the dent on the bed where I would have lain. “I’m here, Sister Yeung. Over here!”
    As if in response to my words, she started to speak, without turning her face:
    “One day…one day these little feet will grow big…” Her voice quickly began to wither into echoes, as if coming from deep down a well. “And they will carry you far, far away from all of us.”
    “Sister Yeung!” I tried again from the floor. No reaction. “Please!”
    The moment she vanished, I was flushed with grief and shame. How did she know? How could she have known?
    Sister Yeung had unmasked me, voiced my most personal, most private secret—a fantasy I’d never shared with anyone. Yes, I had thought frequently of escape. Yes, I had dreamt about fleeing my family. I wanted my hands to be free .
    I wept quietly at the foot of the bed for a while before crawling back in. Li stirred but miraculously did not wake. The butterscotch medallion sat in his palm like some magical tram fare. When dawn broke, my pillow was soaked with tears. Sister Yeung never returned. She must have found what she had come for.
     
    Soon I, too, got what I was longing for.
    That Mother and Father were moody was nothing new. Had we been any richer, or any poorer, they might have given in to the silken promises of the opium den; that they did not, I remain eternally grateful. But where once the two of them sank into what the amahs termed the Sulks, each moping around in a private gloom of their own, they now openly banged heads—an unthinkable move for Father, who had spent his entire life dodging conflict.
    “Things will work themselves out. You’ll see!” Father would say.
    “That’s all you ever do. Defer, delay, deny!” This was Mother’s usual retort.
    Whenever these clashes grew too intense, a quaint old propriety kicked in; they clamped down and reconvened in their bedroom with boiling tumblers of tea. There, with the door closed, they lobbed accusations at each other until the acrimony wore them both down and a blackened silence took over.
    Our fate was sealed by two other events happening in quick succession. First, Father lost his job. His spineless principal, under pressure from a growing cadre of antibourgeois parents, decided that the teaching of poetry to twelve-year-olds was a waste of resources. Then the stock exchange crashed in New York, which meant that our stock exchange, too, was crushed in the ensuing depression.
    Things had not worked out according to Father’s lazy faith in goodness happening to the good. By default, Mother, that well of negativity, won.
    We were called in to a family caucus.
    Father, decided our matriarch, was to redeem himself in the Nanyang—the South Seas—a band of tropical islands that were seemingly immune to the ups and downs on Wall Street because its assets were material. Real, as opposed to the intangible, theoretical realm of stocks and bonds. The world would never stop needing tin, rubber, palm oil, tobacco. Mother’s reasoning was that even if Father had to take on humiliating work in the plantations, at least we knew nobody there who could gossip.
    He was to remit money home to us at the end of every month. And