He would see, she thought, how much better things could be. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t understand, what chance did he have, with an education like that? Provided by the British—that was the hardest thing, having these people come in and run everything for a century and a half. No wonder he could only see through their eyes, valuing their opinion more than his own people's. She would change him, she was confident. In the meantime, she started work on Mollie. Nothing too overt, so as not to frighten the girl away, just a few nudges. She hung on to small signs of encouragement, like the day they were out shopping together and Mollie said, without prompting, what a shame it was that the bank workers didn’t have a proper union, she would have liked to be part of something so powerful, though maybe Barnaby wouldn’t have liked it.

The election took place five days after merger, their first as part of another country. The night before, the main party warned that Malaysia would send in troops and renew the state of emergency if Barisan were to win. This was scarily plausible—Emergency had only ended three years previously, why wouldn’t it start again? They also claimed, spuriously, that every vote for Barisan was a vote for Sukarno, that Barisan was conspiring with the Indonesians to bring Singapore down through Konfrontasi. Perhaps that’s why people voted the way they did, out of fear. Lay Kuan thought so. She won her seat, as did a dozen others from Barisan. Not enough to claim power, but something.

Staying up late for the count, her head buzzing as she stood still for the first time in days, Siew Li felt a flicker of optimism. This would just be the beginning. She wished her children could be here to witness it, but of course they were in bed. There was even more to do now. Once Lay Kuan was in parliament, she would be able to push forward legislation. Even in opposition, she would do a lot of good. Could the system be changed from within, after all? The leftists could no longer be ignored. This would be a new era, she was sure of it.

In the end, it lasted less than three weeks.

•

Later on, she would play those final minutes over and over in her mind, trying to find the break. There must have been a moment when her life cracked, actually broke wide open, falling into too many pieces to ever come back together again. But there was no single instant, or maybe it was too far back, long before she could possibly have known where this path or that would take her. Like the Chinese proverb, a thunderbolt from the clear sky. She would always remember afterwards the lack of clouds, the blue dome overhead like a promise.