The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

Author:Yangsze Choo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

* * *

Later that evening, when my mother was resting and my stepfather had gone up to his room, Shin and I went out to eat. It was suffocatingly hot. Most places were closed already, but Shin took me to a roadside stall that served hor fun, wide flat rice noodles, in soup. We sat down at a rickety folding table, one corner of which was propped up on a brick, next to three men who were taking a break from an all-night mahjong party.

As Shin went to order, I listened with half an ear to the men discussing their mahjong debts. My mother, too, must have joined such parties to run up a debt of forty Malayan dollars. Thinking of the money made my stomach turn, and when Shin set a bowl of steaming sar hor fun in front of me, I could only stir it listlessly with my chopsticks.

He sat down opposite and began to wolf his noodles. Under the hissing carbide lamp, with its fluttering circle of moths, he looked nothing like my stepfather and I felt a surge of relief. I pushed my untouched bowl across to him.

“I need you to talk to your father.”

“About what?”

It didn’t seem right to discuss our parents like this, but I had to say it. “He has to leave my mother alone. She can’t get pregnant again.”

Shin’s face was pale under the bright white carbide lamp. “I already told him so when I got in this evening.”

“Will he listen to you?”

He shrugged. This conversation was just as awkward for him as for me. “I did tell him there were other options.”

“Like what? Visiting prostitutes or becoming a monk?” I stabbed a fish ball viciously out of Shin’s bowl. I didn’t care what my stepfather did as long as it kept him away from my mother.

“Like contraception.” He scowled to hide his embarrassment. “Anyway, you needn’t worry about things like that.”

“Even I know about French letters.” Or what they called the “male shield”—as though it were something valiant. “I’m sure he won’t do it, the old bastard.”

That was usually Shin’s line, not mine. Generally I avoided calling his father names. By doing so now, I’d crossed an invisible boundary.

I was never quite sure how Shin felt about his father. After all, my mother often made foolish decisions that made me feel like shaking her, but I still loved her. I suspected it might be the same way for Shin, no matter what his father did. Perhaps that was what it meant to be family—you were shackled together by obligations that you could never escape.

But instead of getting annoyed, he gave me that thoughtful stare again. “How do you know so much about things like this?”

All I really knew came from listening to the girls at work. They said that the best thing was French letters, or condoms, widely distributed since the Great War. But I couldn’t explain how I’d learned that to him.

“It comes from not having any feminine delicacy,” I said crossly.

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