The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Author:Rachel Heng [Heng, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Here was a thing Hia would never tell anyone: he had grown tired of fishing. He would never tell as it did not matter. One fished because one had to, because it was how one lived. What one was or was not tired of, that was irrelevant.

There were times, though, when Hia remembered how vast the sea had seemed when he’d been a boy, how brave his father for venturing into it. His earliest memory: weaving his first crab trap with Pa, the supple rattan refusing to make the domed shape he’d had in his mind, coming out meager and off-center instead. How proud he’d been when Pa placed the bait tin into his misshapen trap and lowered it into the shallows. How Pa’s face had blossomed with genuine delight when they’d pulled up the trap later to find a pair of small crabs scuttling through the lopsided space.

His first crab trap. His first boat trip out with Pa. His first time at the market. His first trip out to those strange islands found by his brother. His first trip out with Uncle, after Pa died. His first boat, after marrying Gek Huay. Soon there would be another first: when little Ah Huat turned six, Hia would take him out on the boat as his own father had once taken him.

Hia still loved it all: the windless afternoons with stale heat hanging over the water; the bright, cloud-lit days, seabirds balancing their slim bodies on round gusts of air; the monsoon rain churning the sea into a muddy soup. And yet he had tired of it, as he had heard some men speak of tiring of beloved wives whom they would never leave. He found himself distracted when out at sea, forgetting how long he’d left nets down, mistaking a strip of gray in the distance for rain and turning back too early, leaving metal hooks out on the porch to rust. The sea had once felt like a vast adventure; now he saw that vastness could be a kind of claustrophobia.

Yet he was protective of his claustrophobia, as men were of their wives, and would defend his way of life against the first detractor. Hia did not think much of Swee Hong’s decision to send his sons to work as clerks in the city, though of course he would never say as much to the provision shop owner’s face. Neither had he believed in Ah Boon and Siok Mei’s foray into that middle school, with all their talk of freedom and city workers and their supposedly difficult lot. A man’s lot was his own to improve. Had Pa not overcome it all—the poverty of his youth, the violence of his own father, the ravenous hunger of the brood of sisters—through his own grit and forbearance? And how easy it was for these students with their soft hands to expound and moralize. Unlike Ah Boon, Hia had never had the luxury of going to school, could read and write only with what little he’d learned from Uncle’s haphazard lessons.

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