“Stella, I’ll ask you again. Do you know why you’re here?”

A sudden paranoid spasm. She voted for the Workers’ Party three years ago, in 1984—her very first election. Her vote had helped JB Jeyaretnam win his seat at Anson. Letting in the opposition. Did they know that? The ballot papers had serial numbers which they said couldn’t be traced, but what if—she shook her head, snapping the thread. Of course that wasn’t it, they couldn’t go after everyone who hadn’t voted their way, that would be thousands of people. Why would they care, anyway? There were only two opposition MPs in Parliament.

“Well, Stella? Have you had enough time to reflect?”

She thought about the previous day. “You said something about my outreach work for the church. Is that it? Have we done something wrong?”

“Who said anything about ‘we’? Don’t worry about ‘we’, just think about your own actions. What have you done?”

“We help them,” she answered, deciding to take the question at face value. “There are thousands of maids in Singapore, and we give them information. Sometimes we pay for treatment if their employers don’t want to. Just last month there was this one, Sri Lankan, she’d had bad toothache for weeks. Her boss didn’t want to take her to the dentist, so we did. She had three teeth extracted. They were rotten all the way down. Some people just don’t care, they think they can treat their maids like—” She realised she was making a speech, and shut up. It had felt good to speak without constraints, just for a minute, but she needed to be more careful. She pressed her thumbnails into the flesh of her palm, to remind herself.

“So sympathetic.”

“God tells us to help the poor. We’re just trying to do that.”

“Why don’t you help your own countrymen? Where is your patriotism? Do you think there are no poor people in Singapore? Why are you so concerned about foreigners?”

She judged it better not to speak. It had been a mistake to say so much. The automatic reaction, from years of having to explain her work to others, had taken over. Better give them nothing to get hold of.

“These people come over here to exploit our system. Do you know how small their money is, how little they will earn at home? The salary here is like a fortune to them, and still you want to talk about welfare.”

She could have said a number of things then, about domestic workers burnt with hot irons, fed nothing but biscuits, made to sleep with the bins. She could have told him about forced abortions and the scars she’d seen, but somehow she knew that none of this would help her case.

“Maybe you’re right,” she forced herself to say. “We should never forget that charity begins at home. When I see my group again, I’ll tell them that. We should do more outreach work for local families.”