After a few years in the new village, he announced one night at supper that he was moving to Kuala Lumpur. The city had seemed unimaginably distant as a child, a different universe, but in fact turned out to be only an hour away on the bus. He’d already bought a ticket. Having spent several years of free time tinkering with the few motorcycles in the village, he had the promise of a job for a car mechanic. Just an apprentice, and it wouldn’t pay much, but he was young and could make do.

He’d timed it well, said his mother as she saw him off, trying to smile. The walls had only just come down and he was ready to leave her. She filled his arms with food—buns for the journey, medicinal herbs to reduce heatiness, dried pork—a pitiful selection from the village shops.

Surely you didn’t expect me to stay forever, he said—and, receiving no answer, waved goodbye and stepped aboard the bus.

•

Nam Teck got used to introducing himself to people—in the village there’d been no need, everyone knew everyone else. He learnt to reduce his story to three or four sentences: the new village, the dead father, that was all people needed to know. They could fill the gaps in themselves. No one asked why he’d decided to move to the city. It was clearly the only choice.

Occasionally someone asked, Was your father killed by the Ma Gong, the communists? Their voices hushing on those syllables, because there were ears everywhere. At first he answered, No, it was the British—but this led to odd looks. They suspected his father of being Ma Gong himself, he realised, and started simply saying, He died during the Emergency.

Kuala Lumpur seemed untouched by the last dozen years of chaos. City dwellers vaguely knew it was dangerous in the rural wastelands—but why would they want to go there? There were difficulties over long journeys, and it was a bore that you weren’t allowed to bring food out with you. As if we would feed those people, said one lady scornfully when he asked—but rules were rules, and they recognised the need for them.

On the whole, the soldiers and barbed-wire fenced villages belonged to another world. People trickled into the towns, marked by their clothes and way of speech as having come in from elsewhere, but no one liked to talk about the past. The British had driven out the Communists, and now everyone was safe again.

He had the sort of face that made strangers talk to him: waiting for the bus, sharing a table in a crowded coffee shop. Everyone had a story. “I was a resettlement officer,” said a neat middle-aged man in the square one evening. “We had to help build the barbed wire fences around the new villages. Sorry, you weren’t—”