Lighthouse

The evening Ying met Auntie Yoke Lin was also the day she learned that, in Singapore, lighthouses did not necessarily resemble the shiny white totems depicted in her storybooks. As her parents’ car trundled down the broad lanes of East Coast Parkway, she leaned forward from the back seat, popping her head into the gap between the two front seats. Ahead, the sky was sporadically lit up by a flash of light—not as erratic as lightning, but far too high to be a streetlight.

“What’s that?” She thrust a crooked finger forward, right below the rear-view mirror.

From the front passenger seat, her mother batted her hand back, “Don’t distract your father.” At the same time, her father eased his grip on the steering wheel and said, “It’s a lighthouse. To tell the ships that they’re near the shore.” He tossed his chin to the right, to indicate the beach that lay beyond the expressway, and the ships that lay beyond that.

Ying turned her head to look. In the dusk, all she saw were the broad silhouettes of trees interrupted by flickering, distant lights, a spreading darkness that the red, orange, and yellow dots punctured but could not penetrate. Her parents had taken her to the beach at East Coast Park before, but only in the day. She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.”

Her father said, “This lighthouse is in the same place we’re going. On top of some flats, high enough the ships can see.”

The car gravitated towards the light and passed under it. Ying pressed up against the partially open window on the left side to peer up at the illuminated trail whipping round and round again. “The light is from the orange roof,” she declared as her father steered the car off the expressway.

“Yah,” her father said as he turned into an enormous car park. “That’s how we know it’s Auntie Yoke Lin’s block.” He pulled up beside a tall, chunky apartment building, identical to the others scattered around the car park like so many stern, concrete sentinels against the blackening sky. Ying slid out of the car and looked up. The buildings seemed as tall as the one she and her parents lived in, yet whiter, broader, sturdier, and more imposing. Only the light that swept in steady, rhythmic circles overhead distinguished this block from the others. As they walked towards the building, she read “5000l” off the sign. “Daddy, are there five thousand houses in Singapore?”

He laughed. “More than five thousand, girl. Come!”

In the lift, her mother punched the round button marked with a plump, bulbous 18. “Later can we go up to the top to see the lighthouse?” Ying asked.

“Cannot,” her father said, “it’s not open. It’s just a machine, set to switch on the light when it’s dark, and switch off in the morning.”

Later, while her mother arranged with Auntie Yoke Lin what time Ying would be dropped off every Sunday evening and picked up every Friday night, and what time the school bus would pick her up every weekday morning and drop her off at the car park downstairs after school, and while her father asked Auntie Yoke Lin’s son, Justin, how he liked his school—“I went to the same primary school, you know. You know Mr. Wong? Music teacher, very fierce!”—Ying dawdled by the balcony doors and watched for the light that flashed like clockwork across the same path of night sky over and over again. How could that little moving flash be enough to guide the ships far out at sea? she wondered. What was the point of...