The Night Tiger(10)

My mother was sitting by the railing, gazing at the pigeons as they strutted and burbled along the ledge.

“Mother,” I said softly.

Over the years, she’d become very thin. Her bone structure was still lovely though, and I was struck by the delicate outline of the skull beneath her skin.

“I thought you weren’t coming till next week.” She looked happy to see me. I could always count on that from my mother; sometimes I thought I’d do anything to keep her smiling.

“Oh, I just felt like it. I bought rambutans.” I didn’t mention that I’d come home carrying a mummified finger, or that I planned to crash a stranger’s funeral tomorrow.

“Good, good.” She patted my hand briefly.

Glancing around, I passed her an envelope. My mother’s lips trembled as she counted the money. “So much! How did you manage to get so much money?”

“I made a dress for a lady last week.” I wasn’t good at lying, so I always kept my statements short.

“I can’t take it.”

“You must!”

It had been two months since I’d discovered my mother’s debts, though I’d been suspicious for a while, noting her anxiety and the small luxuries she’d given up. She even ate less at mealtimes. And especially, no more mahjong parties with her friends. For it was mahjong that had done this.

Upon questioning, she’d broken down. It had been deeply unsettling to see my mother weeping like a child, pressing her hands against her mouth while the tears ran silently down her face. One of her friends had recommended a lady who lent money privately. She was very discreet and, most importantly, wouldn’t mention it to my stepfather.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” I’d said angrily. “And what kind of interest rate is thirty-five percent?”

My stepfather could have repaid it. He made a good living as a tin-ore dealer—but we both knew what would happen if he found out. And so, bit by bit, we squirreled away money. She was much slower than me. My stepfather scrutinized the household accounts every week, so she had to economize without alerting him. But since I’d started working at the May Flower, I’d been able to pay down some of the principal. My mother always tried to refuse, but in the end, I knew she would—indeed, must—take it.

She hid the money away in the toe of her wedding slippers. My stepfather would never look there, though he liked her to dress well. She’d wanted to sell her jewelry, but he often requested that she wear certain pieces and it would be difficult to explain 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.