Time

On The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

“My parents didn’t give me happiness. But they set me free. They gave me freedom.”

10:30 pm on a Saturday night. I was laying between my parents, as I often do on the rare occasions when I am home. My mother stretched beside me with her phone clutched in her hand; its buzz loud and incessant. She patiently sifted through the messages: offers from suppliers, reports from her team, endless chatter from multiple group chats (from middle school batch mates to college clique—you name it, she has it). She showed me a broadcasted video—you know, the kind that boomers love, the kind that hovers close to a bad dad joke—which left me no choice but to snigger and tease her for being, well, a boomer. I snuggled close to her and eyed her messenger, making out some familiar names—those she mentions now and again, those I have met. I cocked my head to my father, who was engaging in a substantially more solitary activity: listening intently to Trump’s latest antic on his gigantic tablet and following it with the obligatory shrug of disbelief. He then moved on to watch a mini documentary on penguins. I have never met any of his friends, I realised. In fact, I never once heard him –

“Don’t you think it’s strange that you know everything there is to know about your children, but I know almost nothing about you?” I said, curling to the other side of the bed.

“What?”

“You know all of my friends. I mean, of course, I’m your child, and the circumstance dictates that you learn this as I grew up in front of your eyes. But technically—technically—I too, have known you all of my life.”

“And?”

“And? And—well, don’t you think it’s strange that I know very little about you? Especially when you consider the fact that I have a wealth of knowledge on Mum.”

“Hmm.”

“Okay. I just think there should be some sort of mechanism for children to learn about their parents. You know, organically. Without me having to ask or digging through old photos that are always lacking context. Because, well, obviously, asking won’t get me a lot of answers.” My father gave me a bemused laugh, and I took it as permission to press on.

“What were you like in school?”

“A nerd.”

“See—that’s not new information.”

He called me a monkey, then went back to the penguins.

I have spent the past two years asking questions. Who was your best friend? Which one of your siblings are you closest to? What were your parents like while you were growing up? Entirely bothersome to my father, I’m sure, but I have been plagued by the fear that I will run out of time or space to do so. I am the youngest in my father’s side of the family, and my grandparents passed when I was young—too young to have questions, too blissfully ignorant of the limits of time or impending mortality. I rely now on the flawed recollections of other family members, and when they could not answer in detail, I berate them, silently and contemptuously, for not putting into good use the time that was generously granted to them and denied me. Time leaks, I had realised, and when you look away, it floods. There will not be heavy rainfall to caution you, and only when the city is submerged will you find the congested drainage. This flood knows no weather, and though I cannot stop it, I must, I thought, find a way to preserve its spring. For long now, I had been building a dam: asking incessant questions, like a teacher delivering a sit-down punishment that does little to change how we interact with one another. It is in this way that time escapes my supervision, and it leaks, drips, trickles. The sound of it guards my sleep. Time will slip through my fingers, despite my best efforts, despite engineering of the highest order. What use are hard transformations when they provide me no resolution?

It is in this way that I realised I should have been planting trees.

***

My father finds solace and security in numbers. He studied statistics in college, and keeps within reach a heavy Calculus textbook, split in two from frequent use. He taught himself Accounting using a single textbook, which now rests on my bookshelf, over a thousand kilometres away from home. My father reveres numbers, and they were, I think, his most loyal companions through adolescence. It is not fascination he has for numbers; it is something akin to faith. He believes absolutely in its power to interpret and decode the many facets of life, though he has softened and warmed, overtime, to abstraction. He understands that his daughters’ affection lies far from numbers, and our home was filled with its evidence: Pramoedya, Goenawan Mohamad, Sapardi, Woolf, Lessing, De Beauvoir—traces of my mother’s upbringing. Numbers elude her, as they do me. Her youth was spent with poetry and literature, and words come to her as if from a life-giving reserve. It is in this way that my parents walk different paths. Their sights overlap but never intersect, and though they try to the best of their knowledge to speak in a speech most clear, they remain indecipherable to the other. Eun Ji Koh recalls a conversation with a school counsellor:

“We need to complete our requirements. Let’s talk about Mathematics. Mathematics. They call it the highest language. It’s the language of God.”

“Math?” I said.

She asked me, “What replaces the language of God?”

“Another language?

“What replaces the language of God?”

I took a breath. “The language of man.”

“Poetry,” she said.

The language of man. The language of mortals, of fallen angels; a language mundane and carnal. It is a detraction, I am sure, to those who believe in such a God. By the counsellor’s logic, Poetry kills the heavenly: humankind turn away from God, and their language is fated to annul His. Yet only the language of man can replenish life, and what is more divine than the creation of life itself? It was in this labyrinth that my parents lost the other. They wandered in solitude and discovered, in due time, the comfort in hearing no other language but your own.

Somewhere in that labyrinth I sat, enraged and afraid; a feeling I liken to losing your adult in the grocery store. I cower in the corner, with nothing but my mother’s language to confide in. I lived in pages. I breathed the swells and ebbs of ink; tasted the blood of papercut and swallowed melancholy with alarming ease. My lips grazed the mad temperament of the poet; my fingers bruised from the shadows of lyrics. It was that—or damnation.

From paper and script I built a dam strong as they come. When the flood came, much later than I had expected, I stood dry as the autumn leaves; time suspended before me. I watched as my parents welcomed the rush of water. They wandered on, further and further still.

***

I must have written thousands of pages filled with hatred, a thousand more with self-pity. Time heals, they say, but I held time at a distance. And so behind the dam I drowned in sorrow. What, I asked myself, was the alternative? I did not possess the privilege of ignorance, nor could I see the reasons for forgiveness. Eun Ji too, grappled with forgiveness, and punished her mother through words she might never read or understand—an exercise later reproached by the director of a writing programme she was enrolled in:

“Forgiveness doesn’t need a reason. it doesn’t follow logical thought, so it frees you from having to be reasonable.”

So I willed myself to write on marriage. Later, I wrote on grief, then solitude—dutifully followed by joy. Afterward, I found the many shapes of love. One day my words built something close to freedom, and my dam leaked. It dripped, dripped, dripped. My chest heaved as time chased me, but the collision grew flowers in my lungs and sewn shut my papercuts. “You don’t have to forgive your mother,” the director said to Eun Ji, “but the poem must forgive her, or the poem must forgive you for not.” Though I did not have with me Eun Ji’s words then, I am no less grateful to read it today. My verses have forgiven souls I never thought I could ever pardon, and in my little corner of the labyrinth another has come to befriend me. You and I know her as time.

***

“You know, I didn’t have the luxury of English books growing up. They were hard to find, not to mention expensive,” my father said on a phonecall when I told him of my latest purchase.

“How’d you learn then?”

“Textbooks. Dictionaries – I like knowing the definition of words.”

“Is that why you don’t have friends?” I said, laughing.

Somewhere in between my questions, I had stopped learning them as my parents. I know enough of them as parents, I thought, and the knowledge never quite helped our relationship. I learned them now as independent souls, tormented in ways I might never understand. But I’d be damned if I didn’t try. It is our parents’ griefs and failures that initiate our own. Their pain bleeds through time and generations: trauma, I have found, is hereditary. But as Eun Ji wrote, “who says love that is painful is not love?”

So I collect the seeds they give me; little bits and pieces of their lives that they are willing to share. They are only saplings now, but I see their frosted tips bowing humbly over the rippling surface of the water. It is not much of a flood now than it is a runnel.

I watch my parents wander, further and further still. No matter, I said, time is on our side.