Lydia Kwa
SELECTED PROSE
an excerpt from Pulse
I walk up to the boarded-up entrance of what used to be Cosmic Pulse and peer between the cracks into a well of darkness. I inhale the musty, dank smell of ruin. My mind projects back in time, back in space, to the life I led behind the shop, out in that courtyard and in the rooms above. I stare at the decrepit state of the wooden windows above.
Did I fabricate the creatures that materialized in the reflection in the large, rectangular well? What if they really existed? And if so, did Mah-Mah know about them?
I hadn’t wanted to confront the loss of Cosmic Pulse until now. All those other visits back to this country, I had avoided this moment. I hate not being able to escape.
Back in my hotel room, I open a can of Tiger beer from the bar fridge and switch on the TV. The Chinese channel is screening Bu Liao Qing, Love Without End, the movie with the famous sad song “Wang Bu Liao.” Mum loved this film. She would beg Papa to take her to the cinema whenever it screened. It was so popular that there would be at least three screenings a year in Chinatown in the years following its initial release. Those were the days when you depended on public screenings to see your favourite films. That was the era of limited access, unlike the current global atmosphere of Internet downloads, DVDs and YouTube.
A film like Love Without End was precious precisely because there were few like it. For my mother, in a life that was fraught with regret, this movie voiced what she dared not express. The way she cried over this movie is the most eloquent expression of sadness and regret I’ve ever encountered.
Yet I’ve never watched the whole movie from start to finish. Even though I have the song on my iPod. It was almost as if I would not allow myself that indulgence as long as Mum was watching. As if only one of us had permission to need this movie. I laugh quietly at myself. Despite my determination to stay aloof, and the constant cynic in my head making snide comments as I watch, I cry anyway. Lin Dai is the beautiful woman who’s crushed by her lover’s betrayal, her selfless sacrifice for him completely misunderstood and vilified. The crass cruelty he’s capable of is infuriating. And yet, I can see the vulnerability beneath his actions. He too must have felt betrayed.
After switching the TV off, I feel overcome with a heaviness that sits in my gut. The problem with that guy was that he wasn’t really open to Lin Dai’s love. What a fool he was. Too bloody full of himself, had all kinds of wrong ideas about her. That’s what made him vulnerable.
So. To be closed is to be vulnerable. Openness and vulnerability—these aren’t the same thing, after all. I had equated them all my life. Fair enough. Ask most women and I bet they would say the same thing. It’s a mistake, though. To be open affords an ability to take in all kinds of evidence about life, about what’s happening in the here and now. Without openness, how could anyone live fully in the present, respond to what is actually happening, as opposed to things of the past? Instead of seeing what we want to believe, we would stand a chance of seeing what is really here. Right in front of our eyes.
© Ethos Books
