The Monsters Within

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There was a thud three cubicles down, enough momentum to imagine a cat toppling some stationery or other. I swiveled out of my chair and glared out the dimly-lit corridor. “Knock it off! I need to finish this, I’m not leaving!” I yelled at it, the thing, whatever was trying to get my attention; I might have included an expletive or three. There was no one in the office by then, no pets were allowed, and the exterminator had just been. Someone was trying to have a peaceful night, and it wasn’t me.

Next morning I checked in with our resident ‘spiritual interpreter’. “It should be fine,” Sam said; word was she had a third eye. I merely wanted useful hints and tips, without getting into the complicated business of why and how she knew what she knew. One time I had a luxurious corner seat on top of a busy traffic junction – and a strange bout of poor luck. Sam swept in with an expert eye (sorry). “Place a few dollars on your windowsill, and around you,” she pronounced. Our local dollar coin with its octagonal perimeter resembled the Taoist bagua (eight trigrams) and, in my troglodyte understanding, helped to diffuse or reset the negative qi flooding in from the crossroads and knifing me in the back.

Over the years I’ve moved around various workplaces and still – somewhat sheepishly– pack a few coins as contingency karmic shields. Sadly, Sam recently passed on; her sister told me she was jovial to the end. I’m grateful to have learnt from Sam the importance of balance, and of accepting what is and what isn’t.

*

I came across the phrase ‘filthy lucre’ in Reader’s Digest, from its “Increase Your Word Power!” feature which I badly needed. I wrote it neatly in my jotter book, along with a few hundred other new words. Our Mandarin-medium Catholic missionary school was modernizing itself by teaching almost all subjects in English instead. I loved the new language, loved how ‘lucre’ rolled off my tongue, loved my innate indignation against usury and base mercantilism. And how with one word you could name a thing and give it form out of a void.

In the pursuit of grubby dollar bills (all right, electronic currency), we instinctively sense that the corporate organization may not be the most nurturing place for the individual. There is something about money that feels unspiritual. With money, other words froth up: greedy exploitative rapacious soul-destroying... Yet the spirit of Scrooge is in the hoarding, not in the prospering; if a fellow member of the community discovers how to better grow resources, we should celebrate! Regrettably, fortune favors the bold with exclusive individual rewards, and many of the lucky bold don’t think to share, if there were no big stick from the state or after life looming behind them.

At nineteen I was most fortunate to find myself at the crossroads: pursue writing, the love of my life, the one thing I was made for, my very soul; or accept sponsored studies with employment that excluded writing. I took the money, and never asked for a cent from my parents thereafter. Mum and dad, Chinese-educated, taught high school mathematics and science in Mandarin and then English; mum was too poor to go to university. They applied for early retirement, finally liberated from daily fatigue and long years of condescension, contempt and bullying from English-educated colleagues. I would choose money again.

I promised myself I had unfinished business, wrote a Jinn story to bind myself to return to unfinished business – my last covenant. I wondered if I was abandoning my soul for good, as I bricked it up behind a facade of ‘real’ work, going deepest cover; a layer every year until I saw only smooth wall.

*

The first decade of work flowed into a second, then a third; time unmeasured careened in rollercoaster loops of professional delight and occasional despair. My time spent in a good half dozen offices was rarely about the money, but about collegiality, teamwork and, where I lucked out, something more than fleeting trust, more than friendships of convenience. Human nature did ensure my fair share of covert and overt skirmishes with toxicity along the way, and I relished every fight for decency and kindness.

One noon I skipped lunch and drove to Waterloo Street (Four-Mile Road in Fukien dialect) and the Guanyin or Goddess of Mercy Temple, an important place for Buddhists and Taoists. My biggest challenge was looming ahead – a proposed and utterly worthy role that was an utter mismatch for me. If I’d believed my soul was earlier lost, the new fork might mean it could never be found again – no hyperbole because close friends thought the same too.

I lit three joss sticks at one of the temple’s many oil braziers, and faced the open sky under the eaves, back to the altars, praying to the Heavens. Next, face towards the temple, praying to the Goddess within. “I– wish they will pick someone else for this role. Sorry Guanyin. I know I am being greedy. I always, always only wish things for my parents, my family. And good things, practical things, for their health, their happiness, for their longevity. You know that. Never wealth and riches, never anything… unreasonable. You know that. I’ve never, almost never wished a single thing for myself.

“But I cannot do this. I wish now like I have never wished for anything else, ever before. This is it, Guanyin. From the very depths of my being, from my very core and every fibre. I mean it. Please. I cannot do this. I wish for this to go away.”

It didn’t work. I accepted the role.

Perhaps I was deemed a fickle worshipper. Perhaps I was in equal parts atheist – since a kid I’ve loved science so much. Perhaps ten years in a school run by the Roman Catholic Marist Brothers, and earnest prayers long after graduation, diffused and confused the karmic lines. I survived that role, just about. Behind smooth wall something broke; and stirred.

*

“In one hundred metres, turn righ–” I dispelled the disembodied voice of the navigation app, no good on private roads. The heady sun had dipped below the treeline but bright sky lingered on, echoing with the caws of unseen crows. I stepped out of my car. The landscapers had just been, judging from cut grass in the air, mixed with incense and hint of crematorium. A statutory of mynas hopped away from me and foraged on, between gravestones and pitted cherubs.

Three decades ago we had regular Physical Education lessons in this adjacent cemetery, although this particular spot might not have been on our weekly jogging route. I was 38 percent overweight and perennially the last boy to stagger back to school at sundown, the Lord’s Prayer my only armor. Was I that afraid of this place? If only I’d known that real terror lies in the hearts of people.

I headed into the air-conditioned memorial parlor, paid my respects, and sat down at the most voluble table, mates from way back. There seemed to be more wakes now, more frequently, and of many causes. The conversations this day were merry ones, reminiscing about a decent person, a life lived well enough, from what we could tell anyway. “Do you remember the hundred chicken nuggets which materialized out of nowhere?” someone chipped in; chuckles all round.

I excused myself a while later and strolled back to my car. In a mean spirit I began to name on one hand those whose eventual wakes I will not attend, though not my other hand. At that moment the lamps along the path turned themselves on.

*

One December weekend dawn I woke ahead of the household, with a sneeze brewing within. “I must go read my emails,” was my immediate thought, “and I mustn’t wake up our toddler or I will get it from the wife.” Our son was five. When my new role kept me at work past midnight for months, he asked innocently if other fathers faced this family separation too; my heart shattered further.

I hunkered down as my sneeze came, burying an almighty mother of all internal explosions. A fortnight later, back from work in Sanya, China, I realized that the ‘mosquito bite’ on my neck hadn’t gone down. One hunch led to another, and I sought a non-aggressive otorhinolaryngologist (ear-nose-throat specialist) who wouldn’t immediately slice and dice. A million-slice MRI showed there was nothing in my head. The ENT confirmed that I had a benign lipoma, slightly smaller than a dollar coin.

“Just your fat cells gone gangsta,” he assured me. Mayo’s more scholarly version was ‘a slow-growing, fatty lump that’s most often situated between skin and the underlying muscle layer, usually detected in middle age.’ So I left it be.

Fast forward to the Covid years. The gangsters flourished in their epidermal metropolis, expanding their turf into the suburban interstices of my neck muscles. My coin grew into a nest egg. As we returned to normal society post-pandemic, people I met started doing a double-take. Closer friends told me to kill it with fire. This irritated the spouse no end.

On the table waiting for the knife, I decided to be a chirpy lamb, observing every detail in the operating theatre, bantering with the ENT and the anaesthesiologist, fighting to stay sentient for as long as I could befor– and had the most fantastic, gorgeous nap of my life. My lipoma had been removed in under an hour; thirty minutes later I was in the recuperation ward, continuing with emails on my phone. But I knew it was time to take my wall down.
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*

“You know you can quit any day and start your writing, right?” my wife says as we walk briskly along a recently rewilded 19th-century railroad. “You don’t have to go on. We’ll be fine. We are fine.”

A few years back I’d sworn I would resign. Yet each time the deadline loomed, something would stay my hand: loyalty to colleagues, shielding teams, my honor and my word to the boss, duty, always duty – yet that was my imagined magnanimity and nobility, my conceit. Because most of the time it was still about the money. Probably. A terrified middle-aged man needed his fig leaf, and I would postpone my deadline again.

We pause for a quick breakfast at a local 1940s coffee shop, now an islandwide franchise owned by the immigrant founder’s children and family. Handmade poems and witticisms adorn its tables and walls, its business thriving with long queues most parts of the day. From poverty to prosperity to poetry, in two generations. We resume our walk on the trail in easy silence. I still haven’t answered my wife’s question. Fingering the change in my pocket, I find a dollar coin.

Who will I find behind the wall now? Things lurk in my heart: hunger envy insecurity fear desperation – who’d read a writer fueled by these? I think of the Jinn in my story of innocence, of Guanyin and her Mercy, of my parents and their continuing kindness. Of the monsters in me that I need to harness, and nourish.

“Do I start writing?” I finally say to the love of my life, holding up my dollar. “Shall we flip a coin?”

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