Sisters

When Yen was seven, she took Su Swee to the Methodist School playground and placed her on the swing. Su thought the swing was a dumb hairy animal, its plank seat hanging unbalanced on fraying hemp, a loose swinging head suspended by ropes of frizzy hair. “Swing, swing!” Yen chanted, pushing the dangling seat into the air, and Su felt the rush of a large animal against her cheeks. It rustled its mysterious paws in her hair. She smelled its breath up close in her nostrils—something sharp, ammoniacal, like the fumy air from the caustic soda bottles in Ah Voon’s storeroom—before she wetted herself. “Aiiyah,” Yen scolded, “good for nothing, scaredy cat!”

“Not so little, already five, how you marry if cannot keep your pee in?” Ah Voon grumbled when she changed Su out of her soiled clothes.

“Swing, swing,” Su mumbled, trying to keep the new word in her mouth a little longer. At five Su believed words were a kind of magic, conjuring ways to protect her from Ah Voon’s tough caretaker’s hands; when Yen and Su talked—Yen more talk and Su more ear—words invaded invisibly, placing unseen, powerful beings into their everyday lives. Later, Su found that words could still the irregular, dancing visions that so terrified her, wordless, behind closed eyelids, and steady the motes into print, which became story and meaning.

Su remembered the first day Yen came home from Methodist School speaking a strange new language called English. Wah, a new magic in this world, and one better for being black magic to Ah Voon, who could only scold them in noisy Hokkien, crackling like strings of firecrackers. Not listening to her scolding, the sisters spoke more and more English—elegant, chirpy, difficult—to each other, leaving Ah Voon ignorant of their wicked ways.

Yen brought back new words for Su each day. Separate words like colored fragments, falling, shifting, breaking out in dreamy shapes inside a kaleidoscope. Or like dried plasticine figures, brittle, snapping as Su forced them out: England. Asia. China. America. House. Father. Mother. Baby. Man. Woman. Brother. Sister. Dog. Cat. House. Tree. Bird. Aeroplane. Sky. See. Run.

Yen laughed because the words scratched Su’s throat and crumbled into messy pieces as she tried to repeat them. But Su didn’t mind her laughter. Su liked the way the sounds scattered, pulling her out of Ah Voon’s lap and into places Ah Voon couldn’t follow.

Su didn’t mind Yen even when she kicked and bit, screaming no words until her face turned pink, then purple.

It was the wind entering into her, Ah Voon explained, a bad wind unbalancing her body’s hot and cold and making her sick. Mama said she was just a no-good eldest sister.

Su knew Yen only wanted her to grow up faster so they could play better together.

Because of Yen’s biting, Mama didn’t send Su to Methodist School. Instead she went to the Government School. Su liked Government School better because Yen had taught her English words and how to swing.

The earth under the school playground’s ten swings was scraped hard by hundreds of pairs of canvas shoes bumping on it every day. At recess, Su’s classmates crowded into the tuck-shop for curry puffs and sticky sweet orangeade. She planted her feet on the grassless dried hollow and pushed off alone on the swing. Once in the air she stood on the seat, pumping the swing higher and higher until it was flashing above the ixora bushes, higher than the young coconut palms by the toilets, until she was almost a bird rushing through the warm air, if she would only let go. Swooping up and falling down, hands gripping the woven hemp, air humming under feet, addicted to flying but more afraid of tumbling off—and so, at last, slowing down, out of breath and hungry.

Then the hot blue sky reeled by as she ran with the other children, without Ah Voon or Mama shouting, “Don’t be a tomboy! Don’t get burned in...